How To Train Your Norse Trickster God
by ZetaTauri
Summary: After the fight on the Bifröst, after it broke and Loki fell, he lands in the unluckiest town in New Mexico. Which wouldn't be so bad, if not for the fact that he finds himself an outlaw, and without his magic to aid his escape.
1. Chapter 1

**AN:** I've been sitting on this idea for a while, and finally decided to do something with it. This has nothing to do with anything else I've written, but some of the world-building may crossover, because I'm kinda lazy.

—

Two satellite crashes in three days was a difficult and tricky story to spin, but difficult and tricky were SHIELD's specialities. With the Quadrantids peaking that week, they had a ready-made excuse for even the most far-fetched, including the particular brand of far-fetched New Mexico was already known for. If anything, the conspiracy theorists were starting to sound like the most rational people in the whole debate. Few people believed even for a minute that either satellites were satellites at all, with theories ranging from some new Stark tech being tested to the old fall-back of aliens in the desert. Though the theory of mutant activity was never ruled out entirely.

It was pure luck that SHIELD were already nearby when the second satellite fell to Earth. And it had been very good luck at that. Had there been any witnesses, covering up a man-shaped satellite would have required so much spin, Earth's entire orbit and rotation would have been knocked off-balance. Without the Bifröst to guide the man-shaped satellite to a safe landing, the descent should have disintegrated him, and the impact liquefied whatever was left.

Norse gods apparently did not lend so well to either outcome, fortunately.

—

Darcy hadn't been told anything about anything. Which wasn't anything new, really. She'd been able to work out a few things on her own though — something in Jane's funding had changed in a very big way, and it probably had something to do with SHIELD. But for the most part, she was in the dark, just like before. Despite Main Street being flattened by a Transformer on steroids, Darcy was still stuck in Puente Antiguo. Winter term had only just started the week before all the crazy started, and Darcy needed the credits if she was going to have any hope of getting her degree in the spring. And not only that, but apparently half of Culver's campus was closed off because some idiots in tanks decided to start shooting at some other idiot on super steroids, and basically, it had been a seriously lame week for everyone.

"Oh, you are shitting me," Darcy said suddenly, making Erik jump in his seat.

"What? What is it?" he asked, getting up to be sure she was all right.

Darcy waved angrily at CNN's website. "My department got completely trashed," she told him incredulously. "At Culver, right? I have to transfer to NYU, which wouldn't be so bad I guess if New fucking York didn't get trashed by the Jolly Green Giant a bunch of evil robots over the weekend. Evil! Robots!"

She sunk into her seat to sulk as Erik leaned in closer to read over her shoulder. What sort of world were they living in that an army of evil robots was even a thing that could happen? CNN had a slideshow of images from Stark Expo, including several of the surrounding areas all ablaze against the night sky. It didn't look like New York; it looked like a war zone.

"I better make sure I still have a job," Erik grumbled as he walked away. "Jane, have you seen the news?"

Darcy grumpily clicked through CNN's coverage of the week of hell for a few moments longer before deciding that it was all too stressful to deal with. She checked the weather instead. The weather practically dictated her day, and she found herself checking the forecast obsessively already.

"Hey, snow in the forecast, so I'm gonna go home then," she declared loudly, not expecting anyone to actually listen. "You know where I'll be if you suddenly need copies or a doughnut or something."

She gathered up her handbag and all the random bits that had managed to escape over the course of the morning. Gum, phone, lip gloss; she even picked up the wrapper from her breakfast candy bar and threw it in the bin on her way out of the building. As soon as she stepped outside the comfort of central heating, she bundled into her hoodie and tromped off down the pavement. The thing no-one ever bothered to tell her before she took the internship, aside from the risk of being flattened by an angry, steroided Transformer, was that New Mexico was _cold_. When she woke up her second day in Puente Antiguo to find a snow flurry outside her window, she almost thought for a moment that she dreamt up the whole internship up. And then she saw the dingy hotel room she was in, and a sad-looking cactus in the snow outside and seriously rethought her life choices.

And then the snow stopped and almost immediately melted, leaving behind only bitterly-cold wind that had a tendency to kick sand around at thirty miles an hour.

The wind was back, making Darcy eager to get home. Home, in this case, being a cheap hotel room that her entire student loan for the winter term had gone into paying for. Armed with only Pell and whatever she could mooch from her mother, Darcy was in for yet another term of ramen noodles and white rice. And here, she was hoping to recover from the burn-out that had pushed her into signing up from a seriously off-campus internship in the first place.

The hotel was on the other side of town from the "lab" — about three blocks, on the other side of Main Street — and Darcy had just about got there when Jane's huge van pulled up beside her.

"Something just landed in the desert," Jane said excitedly, leaning over Erik to talk out the window.

Darcy's eyes went wide as she cast about frantically, momentarily forgetting most of her motor skills. "What? Really?"

She didn't dare say what they were all thinking. Instead, she threw open the passenger door and climbed over Erik to get into the back of the van. Before she was even seated, Jane stomped on the accelerator hard enough to make the whole van lurch. Darcy was so excited about what she knew they were going to find that she almost didn't even mind falling sideways off her seat.

It was no surprise, finding another massive crater outside of town, just crawling with Men in Black. Jane parked as close as she was able to get and jumped out of the van to go stand where someone would notice her. As if they would have missed the van driving up in the first place. Finally, Coulson finished whatever was so important on the other side of the hapdash fence and walked up to Jane while the rest of his team of spooks carried on with their thing.

"Doctor Foster," he greeted with a curt nod.

"Was it him?" asked Jane quickly.

Coulson gave her one of the patronising smiles he must have practised in front of a mirror. "We'll let you know when we have more information. But until then, this is a secure area."

Darcy watched out the open driver's-side door, her attention quickly wandering when it became clear that Coulson wasn't going to share any of his secrets. She hadn't seen the first satellite crash, but she heard Jane's description of it. There were no plastic cities built around this one, but there was still something seriously weird about it.

"Hey, is that a stretcher?" she called out, looking over at what seemed suspiciously like an unmarked ambulance. Not that she'd ever seen an unmarked ambulance before, but if such a thing did exist, it would look like the white van parked on the other side of the fence, where two men loaded something suspiciously stretcher-like into the back.

Coulson's gaze turned to her for the briefest moment before returning to Jane.

"We'll be in touch," he said in a way that sounded more like he never wanted to see any of them again.

Jane nodded slowly. "Right. Thank you," she said in a way that definitely wasn't sincere.

She got back into the van, slamming the door loudly behind her. "More information, my ass," she grumbled.

Darcy moved back to the seat behind Erik before Jane could throw the van into reverse gear and put her through the windscreen.

"Seriously, did that look like an ambulance to anyone else?" Darcy asked. "It looked like someone got hurt."

Erik cast a wary glance over to Jane as she pulled away from the site and headed back into the desert, toward town. "It was probably nothing," he said uncertainly.

"No, it did, though," Darcy insisted. "I mean. It didn't look like it was Thor or anything. You could see those muscles from across the Atlantic."

"No. It wasn't Thor," Jane said, her voice unnaturally steady. She stared straight ahead, not even flicking so much as a glance at either of the other two. "He had to go home and take care of some things. And home's a long, long, ilong/i ways away."

"Yeah, but on Stargate, those Einstein-Rose things are pretty fast, aren't they?" asked Darcy.

"Are you trying to help?" Jane asked shortly.

Erik laughed nervously, putting his hand out as if to back Jane away. "It was nothing. I'm sure it was probably just a meteorite. The showers are this week. Something might have touched down."

"Stupid clouds. I really wanted to see those things," Darcy grumbled.

The van went quiet for a few long moments, with only the sound of the engine and the rumble of sand and the desert being kicked up by four-wheel drive filling the space. With the sun hidden behind heavy clouds, everything seemed bleak and almost blue. With no proper roads for miles, navigation was almost entirely by GPS.

"Hey, careful not to hit anything," Darcy said finally.

Jane looked into the mirror to glare at Darcy. "That is not even funny," she said.

"No, you're right. Three times would be hilarious."

Erik snorted, quickly covering his mouth with his hand to try to hide his laughter. Jane heard anyway and shook her head. "Oh, don't you start too," she warned.

"You hit him twice in twelve hours, Jane," Erik pointed out, laughing more openly. "At this rate, I think the car would give out before he did."

"Yeah, well. He's not here, so I guess we'll never know," Jane said sharply.

The other two went quiet, both looking anywhere but at Jane. "Seriously, though. Don't hit anything," Darcy said eventually.

"Oh, listen to your iPod," Jane shot back.

Erik laughed again, not even bothering trying to hide it this time. For a moment, Darcy almost considered lying and saying the battery was dead, just to annoy Jane, but then she'd have to stick to that for the entire ride back. So she pulled out her headphones instead and started the arduous task of untangling them.


	2. Chapter 2

It turned out everything was royally screwed up from the weirdest week ever, but not as bad as it could have been, thank God. Lower Manhattan was still in one piece, and NYU was going to offer a full credit transfer, considering the circumstances.

Luckily, Culver's admissions office had been spared in the whatever the hell it was that flattened part of the campus, so Darcy was at least able to email back and forth with her adviser about what all transferring to NYU would entail. Which, thankfully, was very little since she was off-campus that term, and the transfer was — for now — only a technical one. But come spring term she'd be in New York, instead of Willowdale. Which, really, was great considering she'd actually be closer to home, and Culver had been her second choice to begin with.

She wouldn't let anyone else hear her say it, but the enormous green rage monster had actually kinda sorta turned things to her favour.

Yeah, that sounded really bad. No-one else was ever allowed to hear that.

She was reading over the most recent email from her adviser when the bell on the front door jangled. No-one ever came into the old show room-cum-science lab, and at first Darcy thought it might have been Jane until she heard three sets of footsteps. She turned round quickly, spotting two faces she recognised, and one she didn't. Coulson, she knew, and she recognised Agent Sitwell, even without knowing his name. But the third man was brand new, and seemed completely bored with being led along to their little desert research facility. He lagged behind almost immediately, looking around the building for anything more interesting than printed photographs of clouds and lightning. He wasn't dressed like either of the other two; no expensive suit or shiny black shoes. Instead, he wore some sort of body armour, as if he was ready for a fight at any moment.

"Agent Coulson, hey," Darcy greeted, though not entirely warmly. "You come to zap us all with your neurolyser?"

Her question was almost enough to faze him, and for a very brief moment he seemed almost confused. "Neurolyser?" he asked.

"Yeah, you know. Flashy light thing that wipes out your memory," Darcy said, miming the action with her fingers. "Because we've seen too much."

"Ah." Coulson smiled wanly and shook his head. "We don't have those. Is Doctor Foster available?"

Darcy twisted in her seat and pointed toward the back of the lab area, closer to the kitchen. "Somewhere back there, doing science." She couldn't help but feel like maybe they were here to pass on that elusive 'more information,' but stamped out that thought as quickly as she could. They weren't going to share anything with anyone, and Darcy knew it.

While Coulson walked back to find Jane, Sitwell stepped up closer to Darcy. He leaned against her desk casually, and if he wasn't one of Them, Darcy would have almost thought he was trying to hit on her. "So, this neurolyser. How's it work, exactly?" he asked.

Darcy smiled up at him. "You're just trying to keep me distracted from whatever Coulson's here to talk about, aren't you?" she asked.

"Little bit," Sitwell admitted.

"Nice try. But I'm gonna go snoop all the same." Sitwell made no move to stop her as she got up to follow after Coulson. He was showing a photograph to Jane and Erik, watching them expectantly.

"You're positive?" he asked.

"No. Never," Jane said. "Just Thor and those friends of his. I didn't even catch any of their names."

Erik shook his head, and if Darcy wasn't mistaken, she thought he looked almost a little bit guilty about something. "You're sure he's one of them?" he asked.

Darcy leaned over to see the photograph, taking it when Erik handed it over to her. It was a candid shot, probably taken from a security camera still, of a man who looked very bored. His black hair was kind of messy and down in his face, and it looked like he was wearing clothes someone found and thought might fit him.

"He's kinda hot. Who is he?" Darcy asked.

"He calls himself Loki," Coulson said. Before he could continue, Erik dropped his coffee to the ground, mirroring the frightened-rabbit looks the women wore on their faces. Darcy quickly gave the photo back to Coulson and shook out her hands, as if she'd touched something unpleasant.

"Not so hot," she said.

"All we've been able to get from him is his name, but you guys seem to know him. Who is he?" Coulson asked. He waved Sitwell in, handing off the photograph to him when he got close enough.

The other three were quiet for a long moment, none of them quite wanting to be the one to speak first.

"Thor's brother," Erik spoke up finally. "He's, uh. Well, the according to the myths, he's not a nice guy. When that…" he waved out toward Main Street, at the destruction that was still being cleaned up, "thing was here, Thor spoke to it."

"He called it Loki," Darcy said. She looked over at Jane for a moment, not sure how much she should say. Jane nodded almost imperceptibly, which Darcy took as the go-ahead to say more. "I don't know, like this Loki guy was controlling it or something." She didn't know Vikings had robots, but apparently these ones did.

Coulson hummed, as if even that small amount of information had changed things. Darcy wasn't sure she liked it.

"What, do you think there's more of them coming?" she asked, suddenly not so sure she liked the thought of it. Up until that moment, the knowledge that she was one of the first people on Earth to meet beings from another planet had been kind of cool, even if she wasn't allowed to really talk about it. The day Thor left, SHIELD made everyone sign so many non-disclosure agreements, Darcy was pretty sure she'd signed over her first-born as well.

But now, knowing that even the mean ones were finding their way to Earth, she wished they'd all just stay on their side of the Galaxy.

"We're not sure," Coulson told them. Darcy didn't like the sound of that one bit. "Until we are, I'm afraid we can't let you continue on as you've been. We—"

"What?" Jane demanded. SHIELD had done nothing but jerk them around since the day Thor showed up, and they clearly weren't going to stop any time soon. "You can't do this! You asked me to figure out how they got here, and now you're pulling the plug on it two days later? This is unacceptable!" He was waving her hands around, though whether it was because she was trying to intimidate Coulson or fly, Darcy wasn't sure.

"Doctor Foster, please," Sitwell cut in. He held his hands out, trying to silence the room. "We just don't want you guys out there on your own. Consider it a… supervised field trip."

"Supervised field trip?" asked Erik. He looked between the two agents, disdain practically rolling off of him. "Because we don't already have enough of you spooks following us around."

Coulson didn't quite glare at him, but it was close. There was a certain disapproval to it, and Darcy couldn't help but laugh at, which only got that same not-glare aimed at her instead. Sitwell, meanwhile, hardly seemed to notice any of it.

"So then what's one more?" he asked with a lazy shrug. He turned to the third man who had come in with them. Darcy wasn't even sure when he'd wandered over, but he stood near their cork board, looking up at all the photographs of the first wormhole that Thor had fallen out of.

"This is Agent Barton," Sitwell introduced. Barton turned round at his name, as if he suddenly realised he was on duty. "He'll stay out of your way. He's just here as a first line of defence. Just in case."

All of Jane's righteous anger seemed to have evaporated as she watched Barton look around the lab. "Are you sure that's necessary?" she asked.

"No," Coulson admitted. "But the way things are going, I think it's better to be prepared for anything."

Erik eyed Barton warily before walking back toward the kitchen. As he went, Darcy bent down to the ground to start picking up pieces of broken mug off the floor. The way things were going, every last one of their mugs would be broken by the weekend.

"Okay. Well." Jane looked around the room, from Coulson to Barton to Darcy, and then back to Coulson again. "That's. Yeah, actually. I think that's a good idea, probably. Do you—Do you know what he wanted? Loki, I mean. Why he's here?"

Coulson shook his head. "He's been transfered to SWORD custody. At this point, we're more worried about anyone showing up."

Jane nodded. "Right. Okay. Thank you."

Coulson and Sitwell both nodded in turn. "Have a good day. We'll be in touch," Coulson said. The two of them turned to walk out, leaving Barton behind to watch over them.

"So. Agent Barton. Do you… want anything to drink?" Jane offered awkwardly. She flapped her hands out limply by her side, looking about as lost with everything as Darcy felt.

Barton turned toward Jane, his hard expression giving the impression that he annoyed that he'd been addressed at all. "Got any Coke?" he asked easily. It wasn't the response Darcy expected.

"Uh, yeah. In the fridge," she said. She got up as Erik returned with a towel and a plastic bag. Dropping the pieces of broken mug she'd collected into the bag, she nodded toward the kitchen. "In here. I'll show you around."

Barton followed after her, taking the opportunity to scope out the rest of the old dealership on their way back to the kitchen. Darcy could already tell she was in for a fun winter term, in a totally-not-fun-at-all sort of way.


	3. Chapter 3

Apparently when Norse gods weren't getting kicked out by annoyed parents, or trying to kill one another, they tended to keep to themselves. It had been a week since Clint, as he preferred to be called (and Darcy couldn't help but wonder how annoying it was for him to get a coffee from Starbucks), was put on scientist-babysitting duty, and there had been nary a sign of Thor or any of his friends. It was like he'd forgotten he'd ever stepped foot on Earth. Jane was starting to seriously mope, and even on days where cloud cover was minimal, there wasn't a whole lot of work getting done. There also wasn't a whole lot of course work getting done, since Darcy was still waiting on her books to get in from Amazon. Rather than sit alone in a cold, depressing hotel room, with nought but her laptop to keep her busy, she spent her time in the slightly less cold and depressing lab with Clint watching over her shoulder as she obsessively refreshed Facebook and Tumblr.

"Is this all you guys do?" Clint asked. He leaned forward and pointed at an infographic. Darcy clicked it to make it slightly easier to read.

"It's cloudy today, so yep. We don't have one of those X-ray thingies." She wrinkled her nose, trying to remember the word for it. "Hey, Jane! What don't we have? Some electron-scope-whatever?" she called out.

"Radio telescope," Jane called back tiredly.

"Yeah, that. We don't have that. We have to do all our star-gazing old-school, and the clouds get in the way or something." Honestly, Darcy barely understood any of it. This was supposed to be her burn-out relief before getting serious about a career in politics, and she was all too happy to spend as much of the term as possible wasting time on the internet.

But not too much time, because she still had six credits worth of lit and writing to pass. The writing was fine, but the lit was in seriously dire straits without the books she needed.

"Hey, has anything been delivered today?" she asked the room at large.

She got a vague chorus of nos from Jane and Erik, and an indifferent headshake from Clint. It turned out that's just how he always looked — either bored, or like he was going to shank someone without warning — no matter what his mood.

"What are you waiting on?" he asked.

"My books for this class. I'm already behind because Amazon's taking their sweet time, apparently." Darcy frowned and clicked over to Amazon's site, hoping to at least get a shipping update.

"Why don't you just download them?" asked Clint, not even bothering to do the decent thing and look away while she typed in her password.

"Dude, you work for the government. Isn't that entrapment?" Darcy was pretty sure that was the dictionary definition of entrapment. Clint only answered with a shrug.

"Yeah, with all the suits crawling around this town right now, I am not even going to risk jaywalking." She found her order in the depths of Amazon's confusing site map, and immediately saw the problem with her order.

"Great. Just what I need," she muttered.

She started the daily dance of gathering up everything that had migrated from her bag and cramming it all back in.

"Hey, boss lady, I have to go to Bloomfield. Need anything?" she asked.

Jane turned to give her an almost comically suspicious look. "What's in Bloomfield?" she asked.

Darcy got up and started making for the door. "My books, since the post office here doesn't exist anymore, and Amazon wouldn't ship to the hotel."

Jane shook her head and waved her on.

"Need company?" Clint asked.

Darcy almost considered saying yes. Almost. "No offence, but I think I need some me-time."

Clint nodded. "All right. How long will it take? I need to call it in."

And if that wasn't just about one of the creepiest things Darcy had ever heard, she wasn't sure what was. "I don't know. Hour and a half, if I'm lucky and don't pass any cops. I probably won't be back here though. I'm like, way behind on my homework and need to get caught up."

"Right. Have fun," Clint said. It didn't sound like he meant it, but he'd been out there in that giant litter pan almost as long as she had, so he probably knew just how fun driving nearly ninety miles round-trip could be.

AKA, not fun at all.

She left before Clint had the chance to tell her she was going to be tailed by a suspicious unmarked car, or something else equally disturbing.

She'd driven all the way down to New Mexico from Virginia, cramming all of the essentials into the back of her old Taurus — mini-fridge and a microwave she bought for her dorm, DVD player, her big book of burned DVDs, laptop, clothes, knitting bag, vibrator. Everything a growing college girl needs. She kept her car parked at the hotel, because no matter how bad the weather got, she couldn't quite justify driving the three blocks across town to get to the lab. And now it was just more convenient, since she could walk around giant potholes a lot easier than she could drive around all of them.

She got down to the hotel and slipped into her car. If she was expecting a reprieve from the cold weather outside, she was sorely disappointed. If anything, it seemed even colder inside the car than it did out on the pavement.

"Worst desert ever," she complained as she slotted the key into the ignition and started the car. She let the engine warm up for a few long moments before pulling out onto the road, taking the long way around to get onto the 550 toward Bloomfield. "Deserts are supposed to be hot! Warm up, car. I want the heater on."

The drive was completely boring, with nothing along the way save sand and sagebrush, and eventually some of those weird green circles you could sometimes see from aeroplanes. Every now and then, the wind would kick a sheet of dust onto the road, making the car want to suddenly hop over into the next lane. Luckily, no-one else ever drove that stretch of highway, so if Darcy did find herself straying over the centre line, there was little danger of hitting anyone.

She got to the post office without killing anybody, and even managed to find a place to park right up next to the door. The woman inside gave her a sympathetic look when Darcy gave her the information for the parcel, which only made her wonder what the SHIELD-spun story had managed to turn into on its rounds through the rumour and conspiracy mill. Not really wanting to deal with finding out, Darcy took her books back to her car as quickly as possible.

Even though she knew what was in the box, she opened it anyway. Perhaps she just needed to actually hold the books in her hands to make the whole thing feel real. If this was what the rest of the term's reading list was going to be like, she couldn't wait to get started on the comparative literary merits of Stephanie Meyer's _Twilight_ and Bram Stoker's _Dracula_.

Actually eager to get back and get started on her reading, Darcy tossed the books onto the passenger seat and started the car again. The sun was already starting to set, and the last thing Darcy wanted was to do a desert drive in the dark with the possibility of crazy Space Vikings wandering around somewhere out there. Though, really, with her luck she'd just run over a giant tortoise or a burro or something.

She followed the highway southbound, squinting against the setting sun that no amount of sun-visor-yoga would block. If she twisted the stupid thing around any more, it was likely to break right off. And that was the exact opposite of what she wanted. Darcy was so busy fiddling with it that she didn't even see the guy hitching until she'd almost passed him. At least, she thought he was hitching. He was closer to Bloomfield than Puente Antiguo, but if he'd broken down between the two, Darcy hadn't seen the car on the side of the road anywhere. She pulled over and checked her mirrors, on the off-chance someone was tailgating her. Seeing the coast clear for miles, she backed up and opened the passenger door for the hitcher. Even in the dimming light, as she craned down to look up at him through the open door, she realised immediately that he wasn't hitching at all. Someone had gone out of their way to fuck him up. He was barefoot, handcuffed, and the clothes he'd probably stolen (judging by the way the jacket he wore had been put on after the handcuffs) were stained with blood.

"Jesus, buddy. Do you want a ride?" Darcy asked, flashing another look behind her for anyone who might be after the guy.

It took him a few seconds to even look up at her. No sooner had his gaze met hers, Darcy slammed her foot down on the accelerator with a string of creative swearing. She hardly even had the time to process exactly who he was before she reacted, but the more distance between herself and that Loki creep, the better. Of all the people in all the world, she had to offer Loki a lift. Christ, who even let him out?

Or perhaps more accurately, who let him escape?

"Oh, shit. Fuck, should have brought Clint," Darcy told herself. She checked her mirror again, watching Loki hunch up into his coat where she'd left him on the side of the road.

He hadn't looked like he was in that bad of shape from the photo Coulson was showing them. But that was almost a week earlier, and Coulson said Loki had been handed over to some other agency. Even after PATRIOT, there were laws against beating the shit out of prisoners. But wasn't that the whole crux of the mutant debate? Laws only apply to human beings. Darcy briefly wondered how close she was to Roswell. Before she could properly contemplate that particular thought, her stomach lurched hard enough to make her want to be sick. She stopped thinking about Roswell and all the crap that may or may not have happened there. But this SWORD thing, whatever the hell they were. They were supposed to be the good guys, right? Loki, even if he was a creep, was still a sentient being.

A sentient being from another planet, delivered to some shady government organisation by another shady government organisation. A nice, long prison sentence never was in the cards, from day one.

Before Darcy could even talk herself out of it, she turned round and sped back toward Bloomfield. With the sun almost completely set, she had to focus more on the opposite side of the road if she was going to have any chance of finding Loki in the dark. Finally, she spotted him still trudging along the shoulder. Shaking her head at her own stupidity, Darcy turned round again and caught him up. Even as she pulled over, she knew this was a monumentally stupid thing to do. But at least if everything went wrong, she wouldn't be alive long enough to be embarrassed by her own stupidity. Gathering up all her nerve, Darcy pulled up alongside Loki and opened the door again.

"You better get in before someone sees you," she said uneasily. "I've got a shower. You can at least get clean before you become America's Most Wanted."

Terribly stupid. She'd never forgive herself for it, but she'd have never forgiven herself if she didn't, either.

Loki looked over at her as if he had no idea what was even going on around him. But Darcy was surprised he was even standing, let alone having managed to get away without being caught. Finally, he seemed to have got the hint and climbed gracelessly into the car, knocking the books aside. He looked down at them, as if their very existence offended him to his core.

"Sorry," Darcy said as she moved them from the centre cup holder and tossed them into the back seat.

As she twisted back around, she caught the sight of his wrists. In the yellow light from above, it was clear he'd been on the receiving end of something seriously not cool, and that he'd done everything in his power to get as far away as possible. The handcuffs had dug into his skin, and it almost looked like he'd actually tried to chew his way out at one point.

"I might be able to…" Darcy started awkwardly. She reached for her handbag and dug around the bottom, finding an old bobby pin. "Here. Let me see your hands."

She couldn't begin rationalise what she was doing, so she didn't even try. Loki was far less dangerous while handcuffed, but she'd already gone this far down the rabbit hole, so why not?

She kept her attention on the rear-view mirror as she bit the pin, tearing off the plastic beads on the ends and straightening it out into more of an L-shape. Reaching out carefully for the handcuffs, Darcy took a steeling breath and tried not to think about the amount of trouble she was getting herself into. She thought instead of cheap sex-shop handcuffs, and losing the key down between the bed and the wall. Cheap sex-shop handcuffs were pretty much the same as the real thing, right?

Loki watched her tiredly as she fed the pin into the keyhole, trying to remember which way to twist it. She fished around, this way and that, trying to find something to catch against. She hardly took her eyes off the rear-view mirror, ignoring the way her hands were starting to tremble as she worked the bobby pin in the keyhole. Finally, she felt something catch as she turned the pin, but even after it clicked, nothing released.

"What the.. Wait." She found the catch more easily this time and twisted it in the opposite direction. It was a tricky, tedious affair, but finally the first cuff came loose just long enough for Loki to get his hand free. He jerked away from her so hard he nearly fell out of the open passenger door. Darcy flinched away, slamming herself against her own door and curling in toward it to get as far away as possible in case he started taking swings at her. After a few moments of no-one hitting anyone, Darcy gathered up the nerve to turn back to face Loki. He was tugging on the cuff that was still locked around his other wrist, trying to pull it off as well.

"I can do that one too," she said timidly.

He gave her that look again, like he didn't understand a word she said. It wasn't until she pointed at his wrists that he connected the dots and offered his hand over. Darcy worked the same process with the second cuff, twisting the pin first one way, and then the other until the lock released. Loki pulled away more slowly this time, looking down to inspect the damage done to his hand and wrist.

Darcy watched him in the dim light. It was even more apparent, with him more or less still and focused on something else, that someone had gone seriously Roswell on him. There were what were clearly puncture marks on the side of his neck, right over where she figured his jugular must be, and there was a dried stream of blood down the side of his face, starting from under his hair. Which, now that she looked at it, some of his hair had been shaved away, the rest a matted, sticky mess. Darcy was no doctor, but there was usually only one reason to shave someone's hair like that. If she thought about it any more, she knew she was going to be sick, right there in the footwell of her own car. So she focused instead on putting her handbag into the back seat.

"Can you shut the door?" she asked carefully. "I was serious about that offer of a shower. If you want it."

Loki stared at her as she spoke, and as confusion and annoyance and complete and utter _despair_ washed over his features, Darcy was certain that he really didn't understand a single word she said. She had no idea how he'd got so far from whoever had done this to him, but she no longer cared. This was everything the mutant rights movement fought against, sitting in her car and staring at her like a lost child.

"Your door," Darcy said, tapping at hers and the pointing at his. "Close it so we can go."

She could see the moment her instructions clicked with him. He pulled the door shut with a loud bang, and Darcy would have cringed for the sake of her car if not for the overhead light going out, only making her decision suddenly very real. It was almost completely dark with no-one around for miles, and she'd invited a psychopath into her car. Brilliant.

Definitely not thinking about it, Darcy put the car into gear and got back onto the road. As she drove, she cast occasional glances to Loki, but he didn't seem too interested in anything. If anything, he looked like he was getting kind of car sick. Of course he was. He flinched every time the car hit a bump, Darcy sincerely hoped he didn't get sick. Her own puke in her car was fine. Gross, but fine. Someone else's was unacceptable.

At least he stayed on his side of the car.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn't until she could see the lights of Puente Antiguo in the distance that Darcy realised the flaw in her plan. It was because of Loki that the town was crawling in feds, and here she was, thinking she could just drive right up to the hotel and lead him inside without anyone seeing. This whole thing was so stupid. She'd be thrown in jail forever if she got caught helping Loki out. So much for a promising career in politics.

"Hey. Hey, listen," she said. She stole a glance sideways, not liking the way Loki was watching the road ahead with his jaw tightly clenched. She hesitantly reached over and tapped him on the elbow to get his attention. He looked over slowly, and he didn't look scary or murderous or anything like it. He just looked sick and miserable.

"Can you understand anything I'm saying?" Darcy asked.

Loki didn't respond at all, which was a response in itself.

"Great," she said to herself.

Loki started to say something that sounded like 'yes' and some sort of noise in the back of his throat all at once, but whatever it was he never got to finish it. He launched into a heavy coughing fit, and Darcy really tried to ignore how it almost sounded he was trying not to cry as well. When the worst of it finally passed, Darcy looked over to see him looking down at his hand, which he wiped off on the front of his shirt. She had a pretty good idea why, even if she couldn't really see it.

It was dark, and most of the roads were unlit anyway, even before Loki's giant robot smashed up half the town — something Darcy tried very hard to ignore for the moment. With things as they were, Darcy was already in the habit of taking the long way round, leaving the 550 before it became Main Street for that mile-long stretch, and circling round the outskirts of the town to avoid the more troublesome roads. She didn't see anyone out watching the town, but that didn't mean anything. SHIELD had rolled right on in and no-one had even noticed until they started taking things away from people.

Darcy pulled into the parking space in front of her hotel room and peered around, trying to spot any hint of someone spying on her from rooftops. But all she saw was black and shadows.

"Just. Stay here for a minute, okay?" she asked, reaching out to tap Loki on the arm, but not quite making contact. She twisted round to grab her books and handbag from the back seat and opened her door. "I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere."

Holding her hand out, as one might try to convince a dog or a particularly precarious stack of paperwork to stay in one place, she slipped out of the car and shut the door as quickly as she could. Leaving Loki alone in the dark probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but leaving him with the lights on seemed even worse. All the same, Darcy moved quickly to unlock her door and toss her things onto the bed before turning on the light. The room inside was just as cold as outside, but the heating could wait a few more minutes. She glanced around once more to make sure no-one was watching her before going back out to open Loki's door to help him out. He was shaky on his feet, and for a moment Darcy thought he might fall over right there on the pavement. As she led him inside, she tried to think about anything other than how she had given a psychopath a ride, and was now inviting him into her hotel room.

She should have left him in the desert. She should have called Clint, or the cops, or something. Anything other than what she was doing. But what she should have done, and what she could have lived with doing were two completely different things. She just hoped she didn't become a martyr to her conscience.

Loki paused just inside the door, warily looking round the small hotel room. But if he was expecting anything specific, he didn't let on. Darcy moved him out of the way enough so she could shut the door, not really sure what to do now that they were inside.

"It's not much," she said as she locked the door. "Uhm. The shower's back there. If you want it."

She pointed, and Loki slowly turned to follow the line of her finger. But he didn't really seem to see anything. Once again, he just looked confused.

"Do you need help? I mean, you know. You're not from around here. Showers might be different where you're from, I guess," Darcy said. She had just locked herself inside with this guy, and was trying to think of anything other than that fact. And the way Loki looked at her, like he was trying to work out some sort of complex equation, only made it all the more apparent that unlike Thor, he had no idea what anything she said even meant.

If this really was Loki — the Loki Thor had spoken to — he should have been able to understand, though. Right? But what if it wasn't? What if this guy just had the unfortunate luck to accidentally identify himself as an intergalactic terrorist? And now here he was, all fucked up because of it. Darcy fought back the urge to let forth a stream of obscenities as she looked at him, still with the coat wrapped round his shoulders, and what looked like scrubs with some sort of sword-shaped logo on the front. Her eyes slowly drifted back up to that missing patch of hair and the stream of blood down the side of his face.

No, he was exactly who she thought he was. Somehow, she just knew it.

"Jesus Christ, okay," Darcy said, rubbing her face with both hands. She carefully made her way over to her dresser, avoiding any quick movements, and pulled out her biggest pair of pyjama bottoms and a Fall Out Boy t-shirt. At this point, she was starting to think that if Loki had actually wished her harm, he'd have done something about it already. She just hoped he hadn't done anything because he was smart enough to realise she was trying to help, and not because he could barely remember how his own hands worked.

"Okay, come on." She reached out to grab his fingers, tugging him toward the bathroom to get him moving.

He pulled his hand away from her, but followed to where she led him. As Darcy turned on the bathroom light, which also came with that annoying overhead fan, Loki peered into the room with with sceptical suspicion. In a way, Darcy was almost glad to see it. Even if he still didn't really seem to understand anything he saw, there was at least some hope that he wasn't completely lost inside his own head. Darcy put the clothes down on the tiny counter and walked over to the shower. She turned on the water, adjusting it to what she hoped would be a comfortable temperature for him, and put her hand under the stream.

"See, look. You can get clean." She left the water on for him and stepped around him to leave the room. "I'll just be right out here." Darcy pointed toward the bed and stepped all the way out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. She shivered hard, not even sure if it was the cold in the room, or everything else. One thing was certain, though. It was freezing in there. Darcy walked over to the long heater/air conditioner combo that sat under the window and turned it to the hot setting (it only had two, the other option being to just blow ambient-temperature air around).

She tried not to think about all the ways in which it had been a bad, bad idea to let Loki into her room. At some point, Erik's library book had made its way onto the little table in her room, and Darcy picked it up and started thumbing through it again. She found Loki's page somewhere in the middle, and even though the book was aimed at kids, it did a pretty good job as painting Loki as a murderous psychopath. Darcy shut the book and tried not to think about that either. He could have been messing with her, trickster god that he apparently was, but to what ends? Even before Thor got hit by magic lightning or whatever the hell that was, he was still a pretty tough dude. Hell, Jane hit him with her car twice, and he was fine. Loki was probably the same way. Maybe all he needed was some magic lightning of his own, and then he'd be fine too.

Darcy sat down on her bed and powered up her laptop so she could check Facebook and not think about the maybe-god who was at war with the shower, by the sounds of things. Whatever he kept banging around in there, Darcy just hoped it wouldn't be damaged permanently. As she scrolled through the day's posts, an idea occurred to her. She pulled her phone from her bag, wondering if Loki would even let her do what she'd planned. But first, she'd have to wait for him to get out of the shower. She should have done this before letting him in there, but it was too late now. And if it were her, she'd probably stay in there until all the hot water in the state was gone, so she figured it was bound to be a bit of a wait. Probably enough time to order pizza, at least. It wasn't a luxury she could really afford, but damnit, she deserved it after the evening she'd had.

There was only one place in town, and luckily it was still open and it delivered. There was a short menu left on the nightstand when she'd checked into the room, and it was still there, next to the phone she never used. Checking the amount of cash she had in her wallet, she decided to go for the cheapest option, and just ordered a medium cheese pizza.

Loki didn't wander out of the bathroom until the pizza arrived and Darcy was paying for it, having just enough cash left over for a pathetic tip for the driver. With her pizza in hand, she turned round and tried not to laugh at Loki wearing pink panda bear pyjamas. The only thing that kept her from doing it was that Loki somehow looked worse than he had before the shower. He was clean, but now without the layer of grime, it was clear just how exhausted and messed up he was.

"I got food," she said.

She put the pizza box down on the bed and opened it. Before she could even get to the mini-fridge for drinks, Loki snatched up the box and took it to the far side of the room.

"Nice," Darcy said flatly. "I guess I'll just have gum for dinner."

She had a few cans of Pepsi in the fridge, and not a whole lot else. She took out two Pepsis and sat back down on the bed to finish checking her messages for the day, and maybe have a good, long think about her life choices. A few moments later, she was startled by the bed shifting under her, and she looked up to see Loki sitting on the other side, with what was left of the pizza in the middle of the bed.

"Thanks," Darcy said, taking a slice. She cracked open one of the Pepsi cans and handed it over to Loki.

He sniffed at it and even tried to peer inside before he finally took a drink. He didn't get very far, though. Almost immediately, it started him coughing again. Darcy tossed her pizza back into the box and reached out to grab the soda can from him so he could get through his coughing fit without spilling it. He held the back of his hand up against his mouth, and from where she sat, Darcy could definitely see him bringing up blood. Not much, but blood was blood in any amount.

"Okay, no Pepsi," he said, setting it aside as she jumped back up to pull a bottled water from the fridge. She opened it and handed it to him on her way to grab a towel from the bathroom, so he didn't use her t-shirt to clean himself up with.

She watched him clean up and down half the bottle of water, realising just how bad the situation truly was. Not only had she invited a psychopath into her single-bed room, but he was a psychopath who had probably had the ability to understand speech surgically removed from his brain. Somehow, she didn't expect to get a whole lot of sleep that night.

"Hey, can I do something?" she asked, hoping that maybe just the sound of her voice would be enough to assure him a little bit. Even if he didn't understand her, it at least held his attention when she talked to him.

Darcy walked back around to the other side of the bed and picked up her phone from the nightstand. "I just wanna take some pictures," she said as she brought up the camera app. She sat down on the bed again, so she didn't feel quite so much like she was looming over him. "Of where you're hurt. Just in case, you know?"

It was plain on Loki's face that he didn't. But Darcy figured that if he objected, he'd let her know one way or another. She held the phone up and let the camera focus as well as it ever would before snapping the photo. At the flash, Loki jumped so hard, Darcy thought he was going to fall off the bed.

"No, it's okay," Darcy said, trying to keep her voice steady. "It's supposed to do that. See?"

She turned the phone around to show Loki the photo of himself, close enough to show the detail of the cuts and bruises on his face, but far enough away to give a sense of scale Loki scowled and looked away from it. Fair enough, Darcy figured. She wouldn't have wanted to see it either, if it were her.

Darcy took the phone back. "Sorry. Do you mind if I…?"

She motioned vaguely to him, trying to get across that she wanted to get a better picture of the left side of his face, as well as the cut on his scalp. Loki studied her for a long moment, making Darcy wish he'd look somewhere else. He might not have been able to understand her, but he wasn't quite as lost inside his own head as she originally thought. His gaze was sharp and intense, almost like he was trying to look straight through her. Finally, he turned his head and pulled back his hair on the left side, showing the cut on his scalp. Now that she could see it clearly, a brain surgery cut was exactly what it looked like. It was long and almost careless, though; a slightly curved line about an inch above his ear. Darcy took a couple of pictures — one zoomed in, and one wide shot — and tried not to be sick. Part of her couldn't help but wonder what they were looking for, though. She'd seen _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_, and this thing didn't look like the ones McMurphy had at the end. This was something else entirely.

"Okay," she said, nodding. She glanced down at her phone, trying to determine her next move. "Is there… anything else?"

She pointed at his chest area, almost afraid of what she might find if he agreed to this. Loki looked down to where she pointed, getting the gist of her intentions more quickly than she expected him to. He seemed to consider it for a moment before nodding and lifting his shirt. His sides were painted an ugly mosaic of bruises and deep cuts, one of which looked like it had recently been stitched over hastily. Another longer one down his side had more torn stitches than anything, but it was far more healed over than it should have been, considering he'd only shown up about a week before. Judging how quickly Thor seemed to get better from being hit by a car and tased and everything else, Darcy wondered how much she couldn't see on Loki because it had already healed.

The thought did not escape her that it was precisely that which those Rosewell sickos were testing.

She decided she didn't want to think about any of that either, and focused on taking the pictures as quickly as possible. Darcy didn't know what she was going to do with them, but it seemed like something that needed to be done. If mutants had full protection against this sort of thing, guys from other planets shouldn't be left out, even if they were complete fuckwits. None of it excused blowing up half the town, but Darcy half-wondered if Loki even remembered doing it.

Darcy put her phone away, watching as Loki pulled his shirt back down. Suddenly, all she could think about was _War of the Worlds_. Those cuts on Loki were healing over, but with the stitches still there he was at an even bigger risk of infection than if they'd just bandaged him up. Darcy didn't want to accidentally sneeze on him and kill him with a cold she didn't even realise she had.

"You know what, take that off again," Darcy said, pointing at Loki. She left him looking confused and went back into the bathroom, fetching up the old metal Captain America lunchbox from the counter. She dug through it on the way back to the bed, finding her tweezers and the tiny scissors she kept in with the rest of her make-up. Setting the rest aside, she sat down next to Loki and pointed at him again, trying to get across by wiggling her finger that he needed to lift his shirt again.

"Let me help," she said.

Loki gave her that confused look again, but it quickly passed and he lifted up his shirt, this time pulling it off completely. He hissed sharply as he raised his arms over his head, making Darcy wonder what there was that she couldn't see.

"This might feel funny," she said as she moved the shirt aside. "Please don't hit me."

She used the tweezers to pull out the torn stitches, starting from the top and working down. Loki squirmed and made faces as she pulled each stitch out, but it didn't seem to be actually causing him any more pain than he was already in.

"Oh, don't be such a baby," Darcy chastised as she dropped another torn stitch onto the towel on the bed.

Maybe it was the tone in her voice, but Loki stopped squirming and fussing after that. With him sitting still, she was able to pull the stitches out more quickly, and she was surprised that he didn't even flinch when she had to use the scissors to cut the ones that were still intact, or when they tugged because his skin had healed around them. While everything around the cut was red and kind of angry looking, he wasn't actually bleeding, so the stitches probably needed to come out anyway.

When she finished, Darcy looked back up at the one over his ribs, which looked much more recent. She wasn't sure if she should leave those in or not, until she looked up and saw Loki watching her expectantly.

"You want me to do that one too?" she asked, pointing at it.

Loki tried to say something, but again only wound up coughing violently. If he was going to do that every time he even tried to make a sound, it was no wonder he wanted the stitches on his chest out. It probably hurt like hell every time he coughed. Darcy waited for him to calm down again before she started cutting the stitches. She held onto the towel, ready to stem the inevitable bleeding, but the cut seemed to have already healed over enough that the stitches weren't even necessary.

Loki watched her curiously as she cut the stitches and pulled them out, one by one. These ones were easier than those on the first cut, since he hadn't really had the chance to heal around them just yet. She got them out quickly, making a mental note to sanitise both her tweezers and scissors in alcohol the first chance she got. When she was done, she put both down onto the towel and reached back into her lunch box for the packet of ELF cleansing cloths. She didn't have many left, and wasn't likely to be able to get more any time soon, but she figured this was a good cause.

"This might sting. I'm sorry," she said as she pulled one from the little black packet. She carefully pressed the cloth against the cut on his chest, not even a little bit surprised when he hissed and squirmed away again.

"Ya big baby. I get this stuff in my eye all the time. Suck it up," Darcy told him.

He sat still again, waiting patiently for her to finish cleaning the area without accidentally tearing everything open again. When she was done, Loki tilted his head toward the right and pulled his hair out of the way, making clear what he wanted her to do next. The cut on his head still looked very new, and Darcy wasn't sure she should be doing anything with it just yet. But he clearly wanted the stitches out sooner rather than later. Probably, Darcy realised, because he knew that if they put it off until the morning, it might wind up being too difficult to remove them.

"Okay," Darcy agreed. She nodded and got up, holding up her hand to tell Loki to stay put while she fetched a smaller hand towel from the bathroom. They were cheap Dollar Tree towels, but still. There weren't even any Dollar Trees in Puente Antiguo to replace it if it got ruined. But it was the only thing she had that she was willing to ruin.

She stood by the bed, tapping Loki's shoulder to get him to turn round so she could reach more easily. He sat quietly, still holding his hair out of the way for her, and she wasn't really sure how to suggest that maybe they wait until morning, so she started cutting the stitches anyway. Just as she thought, the cut on his scalp was newer than the one on his chest, and it did start bleeding. Not as badly as it could have done, but she was glad she'd grabbed the hand towel.

"Other hand," she said, reaching out for his free hand. She put the towel in his hand and pressed it where she needed it, leaving just enough room to still see what she was doing. To her relief, he stayed exactly where she put him through the whole thing, letting her pull out the stitches without having to worry about trying to hold his head together in the process.

When she finished, she moved his hand again to cover the whole cut with the towel, and tried to work out how to tell him to just hold it there for a while. Even if the cut did seem fairly recent, it wasn't bleeding anywhere near as badly as she expected. With any luck, it would probably stop on its own before he fell asleep.

She wasn't sure if it was the serious weirdness of playing doctor for an alien Space Viking, or just the heater, but she suddenly felt way too hot. The whole room was like a sauna, and she needed a little bit of space.

"Okay. All done, I guess," she said as she stepped away. She reached into the bathroom to put the scissors and tweezers on the counter so she remembered to clean them later, and then quickly walked back to the heater to turn it off. While she tried to coax it into having a middle setting, Loki got back up from the bed and wandered into the bathroom again. Eventually, Darcy gave up on the heater and just turned it off completely. She found Loki inspecting the cut on his head in the mirror, and was content to leave him there for as long as he wanted. She was starving and more than a little freaked out, and still way behind on her homework. Not that she was going to get any reading done now, but she could at least hold one of the books in her hand and pretend to look at the pages.

—

**NOTE:** In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	5. Chapter 5

Darcy waited until long after she was sure Loki had fallen asleep before even considering going to bed. After about a half hour looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, he finally put his borrowed shirt back on and sat back down on the bed to watch Darcy with a curiosity so intense, it made her want to scream. But she didn't, and instead pretended that she hadn't noticed him staring, and eventually — mercifully — he fell asleep. Darcy kept glancing over at him, each new thing he did only making her realise how stupid her plan was. She was half-tempted to sleep in the bathroom, with a door that locked, but the bath tub was too small for even her to fit comfortably, and somehow sleeping on the floor just seemed gross.

Around midnight, she finally decided she needed to get some sleep before dawn broke and brought with it the sort of harsh reality that only morning light could properly illuminate. She powered down her laptop and pulled some pyjamas out of the dresser and slipped into the bathroom to change. Her scissors and tweezers were still on the stained yellow counter top, but she tried not to look at them. Part of her wanted to just throw them away, like they were evidence to some terrible crime. But she needed those tweezers; not just for her eyebrows, but also because there was nothing sexy about those weird, dark hairs around her nipples.

She steeled herself, taking deep breaths before shutting off the light and going back out to the main room. Loki was still asleep, sprawled out on his back like he owned the place, but still on what had quickly become his side of the bed.

Darcy needed to figure out what to do with him, and the sooner the better.

She carefully walked back round to her side and climbed under the covers, thankful that Loki had at least had the decency to fall asleep on top of them. It wasn't much in the way of a barrier between them, but it was something. She put her glasses down on the night stand beside her and rolled over to put her back toward Loki, already knowing that she wouldn't be getting much sleep at all. An unconscious psychopath was still a psychopath. For all she knew, he was just waiting for her to fall asleep so he could strangle her and steal her skin to wear it like a suit. And that wasn't helping her sleep at all.

She wasn't sure when she did manage to actually drift off, but the clock beside her said it was just a few minutes before two in the morning when she woke up again. The room was freezing, as it had been every night, because leaving the heater on only meant she woke up at two AM because the room felt like a sauna. Darcy tried to pull the blankets closer around her, but Loki's weight on top of them made it impossible. The only way to get any warmer was to back away farther from the edge, and closer to Loki.

Fuck that noise. She'd rather freeze.

Or so she thought. After nearly an hour of failing to fall back asleep because she was too busy shivering, she finally gave in and moved back toward the middle of the bed. She didn't get quite close enough to actually come into any real contact with Loki, but it did mean she got more blankets. Not that she really felt any better for it. She was still cold, and now she was within perfect strangling distance.

She decided that rather than freezing or being strangled, she'd prefer to swelter. But just as she started to get up to turn the heater back on, Loki muttered something that sounded like 'nay' and rolled over, wrapping one arm tightly around Darcy. She went completely still, not sure what she should do. What if she argued? Would he get angry? Was he even awake? She didn't even want to try to turn around to see. He started saying something else in complete gibberish, as far as Darcy could tell, but soon started coughing and hacking again. Thankfully, he let her go while he coughed his throat raw, and it was all Darcy needed. She flung herself out of the bed and sat down against the wall beneath the window, staring at Loki as he calmed down and went back to sleep. Huddled against the wall, Darcy buried her face in her hands and forced herself to be quiet; forced herself not to cry, if only because she didn't want to wake Loki up and piss him off.

She knew she could still get out of this. She could tell them that Loki forced his way into her car. That he made her bring him here. And SHIELD would probably believe her, especially when Loki couldn't refute that. But she knew she couldn't — she wouldn't. Not when SHIELD or SWORD or whatever were the reason he couldn't refute her story in the first place. Not when she'd got curious enough to go surfing Wikipedia. That incision on his scalp, just above his ear; they weren't messing around randomly. Thor was an alien from another planet, and he spoke perfect English. Loki was from the same planet, and he didn't understand a damn word that was spoken to him, because some bastard with a medical degree they didn't deserve had gone spelunking in Loki's language centres. Whatever he had to say, they didn't want anyone to hear it.

Giving him back to the people who had done that to him would only be a very long and painful death sentence. He deserved prison; not that. The best thing she could do would be to get through the next day, and take him back out to the desert under the cover of night and send him on his merry way. Maybe his own kind would find him and come pick him up and get him out of Earth's hair, then.

Not sure what else to do, Darcy reached over and turned on the heater. Sitting as close as she was to it was uncomfortably warm almost immediately, but she couldn't bring herself to move away. Everything ached, and she wanted nothing more than to go back to bed, but bed was the last place she wanted to be. She had made a terrible mistake, and now she had no idea how to fix it.

Darcy reached for her handbag and quietly as she could pulled her taser from it. She held it close to her as she curled up against the wall again, leaning in the uncomfortable corner where the air-conditioner stuck out from under the window. The warmth coming from it started to lull her back to sleep despite everything, her exhaustion winning over. She drifted in and out of sleep, slumped against the wall while Loki slept in her bed.

She didn't know how many times she woke up and fell back asleep over the night, but she was definitely asleep when a heavy pounding came from the door. Darcy jerked awake, looking at the door and waiting for someone to break it down. After a few moments, when no-one came bursting in, she looked back over at Loki, also awake and looking down at her in confusion.

"Shit," Darcy whispered, carefully getting to her feet. It didn't matter who it was; she needed to act fast. "Get down. Hide!" she hissed at Loki, waving him off the bed.

He didn't seem to need to be told twice, and was down on the floor in an instant. It wasn't the best hiding place, but there weren't a whole lot of other options. Darcy quickly pulled off her pyjama bottoms, glad she'd kept her panties on under them, and unlocked the door. She cracked it open, hiding as much behind it as she could, and peered out to find Clint standing outside, looking more keyed up than he had all week.

"We've got a problem," he said. "Loki escaped from SWORD custody last night."

"Shit," Darcy hissed. Were they onto her?

Clint rubbed his face and pointed out toward the black SUV in the car park outside. "The good news is you get a ride into work today. Come on."

"What, right now?" she asked. She glanced over at the clock, feeling like the Universe was out to get her when she saw it was about ten minutes to seven. "I don't go in until about ten."

"Yeah, well I go in at seven," Clint said.

Darcy was not amused. If she was in trouble, Clint would have probably said something already, which meant she was just being pointlessly jerked around. Typical SHIELD.

"Dude, I'm like, pretty much naked. You woke me up," she sad, shifting just far enough out from behind the door so he could see that she was, indeed, pretty much naked. "You gotta give me like, at least an hour to get ready. I'm a girl; we take a long time."

"Thirty minutes," Clint said, obviously not buying it for a second. "I'll be in the car."

He turned to walk back to his giant SUV. Darcy shut the door and leaned against it. She'd managed to buy herself half an hour to work out what to do. It wasn't much, but it was more than she'd expected to get away with. She scrubbed her face with both hands, wondering just when her life had turned completely upside down. She almost wished she was back in Culver, dealing with giant green monsters instead of this.

When she looked back up again Loki was sitting up behind the bed, actually leering at her. Of course he was.

"Oh my god," Darcy said, pulling her shirt down as low as she could. "No, you stop it right there. I don't even…"

She didn't know what she didn't even, but it was something strong and acidic that sat high in her chest. She waved it all away as best she could and fetched up her taser from the floor and went to go dig some clean clothes from the dressed.

"Whatever, man. I have to shower. If I even think you're trying to get through that door, I'm tasing you in the balls." She took everything into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. The flimsy lock wouldn't really keep anyone out, but it was that much more of a barrier between her and Loki. Getting undressed more than she already was, knowing he was just on the other side of the door, was more difficult than she expected it to be. She didn't want to get undressed, but she needed to shower. She'd spent all night sweating next to the heater, and couldn't put up a good front if she went into the lab smelling like an old gym bag. Finally, she undressed and stepped into the shower, focusing just on that and trying to ignore everything else. She tried to ignore the photos on her phone, and that constant look of incomprehension on Loki's face. She tried to ignore the fact that Puente Antiguo was crawling with SHIELD agents, and what they would do to her if they found Loki in her hotel room. She tried to ignore the fact that he was just on the other side of the door, and she tried to ignore the question of whether he had actually been asleep when he grabbed her during the night.

She wasn't really sure when she had started, but she soon found herself with her face buried in her hands, sobbing quietly. She had made a huge mistake, and there was no way out of it. She was trapped, and if SHIELD didn't do something terrible to her, Loki would. All of that frustration and terror and helplessness came out in tears that were washed away by the hot water streaming down on her face. No evidence was left behind, but she hated herself for it all the same. This could have all been avoided if she had just listened to the number one piece of highway advice in the first place and not stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. It was all her fault, and she had no-one else to even conceivably blame.

But she also didn't have time to waste on blaming herself. Clint would be back if she wasn't out there soon enough, and she still had to figure out what to do with Loki while she was pretending to be a good little intern. She washed quickly, barely even worrying about her hair, and dressed just as quickly. By the time she was out, she felt almost in control of the situation, and still had fifteen minutes to spare. Loki was back up on the bed, and had apparently managed to turn off the heater before he picked up Darcy's handbag and emptied out in front of him. He sat there, curiously examining a tampon, which he hadn't managed to unwrap yet.

"Hey, no!" Darcy snapped, rushing forward to claim her belongings. She crammed everything into the bag, pulling the tampon from Loki's hand. "Lady things. Not for you."

Loki actually had the audacity to glare at her. Darcy almost had the audacity to smack him. She didn't though, because she knew what would happen if she did. And she didn't want to even start to go there.

"Okay, you're bored. I get that," she said. She put her handbag aside and exchanged it for the universal remote control she'd brought from home. "Look at this. You'll like this. I promise."

She made sure he was looking at what her fingers were doing and turned on the television. At the sudden noise from it, Loki jumped and glared at the television, and then back at Darcy. Ignoring it as best she could, she turned the television off and on again a few times, making sure he got the point.

"If you don't like Telemundo, there are other things here. See?" Darcy said. She waved her fingers in front of his face to get his attention again and showed him how to flip through the eight channels available. After a few moments, Loki took the remote from her and tried it for himself, turning the television off and on a few times, and looking like he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to do about it.

"I have, uhm," Darcy started. She looked around and finally found her giant DVD book. Most of her DVDs weren't even proper DVDs, but just several .avi files burnt to the disk, in the event that her computer crashed and lost all her downloaded movies. God bless Philips and their DVD players that would read anything.

She pulled a random disk from the book and walked over to the player. Loki sat up and followed her as far as the foot of the bed, watching as she deliberately pressed the button that opened the tray and then dropped the DVD into place.

"You press this one here," She said, turning round to point at the play button a few times. Loki looked up at her, and then down at the remote again and pressed the button to queue up whatever files were on the DVD. It was iBrave/i, apparently.

"You'll probably like this one," Darcy said. "It has a witch and a bear and a princess who doesn't take any shit from anyone."

That confused look was back on Loki's face. Darcy thought she might be starting to get used to it. She glanced over to the clock and cursed Clint for only giving her a half hour. He'd be banging on the door again if she wasn't out there soon, and she still had to finish getting ready. She grabbed up her make-up lunch box and took it back into the bathroom where it belonged. She hardly had any time to do much at all, but some quick eyeliner and bronze eye shadow gave the impression that she had at least spent her half-hour being somewhat stereotypically girly. She took her taser and stuffed it into her handbag with the rest of her things and grabbed her books and her glasses, setting it all on the foot of the bed so she could pull on her shoes.

"I'll try to be back as soon as I can," he said. She slid her glasses on and picked up her things before making her way to the door. Loki was on his feet in an instant and grabbed Darcy by the wrist so hard it hurt.

"Nay," he said again, pulling her back. He tried to say something else, but started coughing again. Not as badly as last time, but it was enough to derail him.

"I have to go," Darcy said, trying to pull away from him. "I—you're hurting me. Let go!"

Loki didn't let go, but he did loosen his grip on her, going from bone-crushing to just uncomfortable.

"I have to go," Darcy insisted again. She pointed toward the door, and through it, at Clint waiting for her outside. "If I don't go with him, he'll come in here and then we're both fucked."

Loki stared at her for a long moment before turning his attention over her shoulder, looking in the direction of where Darcy had pointed. Finally, he nodded and released her, saying something that sounded like, "yow far." Whatever that meant. She assumed it meant he wasn't going to fight her on this.

"Okay," she said. "I'm going now. Get back, or he'll see you." She waved him off, waiting until he stepped away from the door and back toward the bed before she stepped outside. Clint was waiting in the SUV, looking around the immediate area. Darcy took her time locking the door, trying not to seem like she was taking her time. She just needed the time to calm down just that little bit. If she was lucky, Clint would think she was just nervous about everything, and not about the very specific problem currently watching Disney movies in her room.

—

**NOTE:** In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	6. Chapter 6

Erik had originally only planned on being in New Mexico for three days, so of course he hadn't made any arrangements at all. He'd brought his laptop, and like, one change of clothes, and that was it. He said he didn't mind sleeping on the ratty old sofa that had migrated into the show room, but it was pretty clear from where Darcy was standing that he probably minded it a lot more than he let on. Up until Thor had showed up, Erik was the closest thing to a Viking Darcy had ever met. And the tiny little sofa really wasn't meant to be slept on by huge Swedish guys.

The lab was almost scary quiet that early in the morning. Darcy tried to ignore Clint as he checked every nook and cranny with his fucking gun drawn, while he made Darcy stay in the kitchen. She sat at the table, watching out the window as other SHIELD agents crept around the street outside. And she knew exactly who they were looking for. She was so screwed. It wouldn't take long for them to work their way down the road and find their intergalactic fugitive in her hotel room. Utterly, utterly screwed. She wondered if she should just tell Clint what was going on. Tell him that Loki had forced his way in. That she was too scared to try to fight him.

Her train of thought was swiftly and violently derailed when Erik started shouting. Darcy jumped up to see what was going on, for a terrifying moment thinking that maybe Loki had managed to follow her without being seen. But it wasn't Loki at all. It was Clint.

"What are you doing? Put that away, before someone gets hurt," Erik said, backing away from Clint. He spotted Darcy and quickly walked over, putting himself between her and Clint.

"The only person I plan on hurting is the son of a bitch that blew up my Ramones CDs," Clint said. He did holster his gun, at least.

"Who still listens to CDs?" Darcy asked.

"I do," Clint said. He kept walking around like he expected Loki to jump out from any corner or shadow in the building. "Last time, I put an arrow in his chest. Next one's going in his eye."

Darcy was prepared to make a joke about Clint's age, but it died before it ever reached her tongue. Suddenly, her mouth felt dry, and she decided that maybe she should sit down again.

"An arrow? Like, with a bow? When?" As soon as she said it, she realised she knew exactly when Clint had shot him. Right around the time Loki was handed over to SWORD, no doubt.

Clint looked at her over his shoulder, like he was trying to decide what he could tell her. "After he landed here. We weren't sure who he was until he started shouting about being king of Narnia, or whatever."

"Asgard?" asked Erik, but when he said it, it came out more like _Ossgard._ Darcy wasn't sure if that was a Swedish thing or an Erik thing. "No, he shouldn't be king. Who let that happen?"

He and Darcy looked at one another nervously, and Darcy was starting to wonder just what Thor had gone home to take care of. And just what sort of crazy she had sleeping in her bed.

Clint hardly seemed to notice any of it, though. "Yeah, whatever. Point is, Coulson's ordered an embargo on all star parties until we catch up with this creep again. Any trips into town will be escorted."

"Wait, seriously?" Darcy demanded. "You guys can't keep track of one person, so you put the rest of us on house arrest?"

So much for her plan of dropping Loki off in the desert when no-one was looking.

Again, Clint didn't look amused at all. "Listen. Right now, my job is to keep you guys alive, and out of the hands of alien nutjobs. And I'm gonna do it. It's my job, because I'm good at it. And if that means I have to tie your ass to a chair, then that's what I'll do."

Darcy leaned closer to Erik. Apparently sanity was not something that existed in her life any more.

"Hey, now. Listen," Erik said, taking a step toward Clint. "We have rights. You can't do this. Just because you've been able to push people around before doesn't mean you've got the right to do it."

Clint looked at them both for a long moment before stepping aside and making a wide gesture out toward the street, visible in the rising sun outside. The street that was slowly being cleaned up, but which still had giant gouges in the pavement. The street that was lined with half-collapsed buildings and a few remaining crushed cars. He didn't even have to say anything to get his point across. The only reason they hadn't been rushed out of town was because SHIELD had suddenly decided Jane's work was important. When the giant robot came, the whole town evacuated, and half of the people never came back. Looking at all of the destroyed businesses out there, Darcy couldn't blame them.

At least most of the houses were on the edge of town. At least the giant robot stayed on Main Street.

"Okay," Darcy said quietly. "But can you please at least keep the gun put away? You're kinda freaking me out."

Clint shook his head incredulously. "All secure," he said, holding his finger up to his ear. He went quiet as he listened to whatever was being said through his secret spy equipment and nodded. "Yeah, you'll be hearing from me if there is."

Darcy didn't want to ask. She had a feeling she already knew. Instead, she picked up her bag and went back out to what had slowly become her work station, finding very little work left for her to do. Jane had said the weather should start to cooperate by February, and without being able to make regular trips out to the desert, there wasn't a whole lot they could do from the lab. Even Darcy knew that.

"Hey, if there's nothing for me to do, can I just go back to my hotel room?" Darcy asked eagerly.

"No," Clint said.

"Of course." In the rush, Darcy hadn't even thought to grab her books, so she couldn't even do her reading. She checked Tumblr instead. She scrolled through her dash, in turns reblogging and and adding to her queue pictures of mostly-naked guys, fluffy kittens, and cupcake recipes. It wasn't doing much to calm her nerves though. She still couldn't shake the feeling of Clint watching her as he stalked around the lab, or Erik glaring at Clint as he pretended to do some work of his own on his laptop. Darcy was just about to give up in despair when one of those probably-fake Amber Alerts came up on her dash. She was half-way to checking out Snopes when an idea hit her. It was a terribly stupid idea, and she wouldn't even try with Clint hovering around, watching their every move, but it would be insurance, if nothing else.

She pulled her phone from her bag and brought up the photo album. She didn't want to look at the pictures on there any more than she had to, and dropped them all into an email to herself. As soon as she sent the email, she locked the screen on her phone and went back to pretending to be interested in Tumblr, and not at all silently freaking out over everything she was doing.

"So, seriously. What am I supposed to do all day, then?" she asked.

"Same thing you always do," Clint told her. "Same thing you're doing right now." He clearly wasn't going to be any help. Darcy waited until his back was turned and stuck her tongue out at him and flipped him off.

"Darcy," Erik scolded quietly. The grin he wasn't quite managing to hide belied his tone.

"What? He barged in on me at like, seven in the morning. I didn't get to grab my homework," she said. She'd been so busy trying to teach her pet supervillain to stay, she hardly had time to think about anything else.

"Just. Just wait a little bit for things to calm down," Erik said. He was just as on-edge as Darcy was, and she could tell. He watched Clint from over the top of his laptop screen like he was expecting a team of armed guards to storm in at any moment. Darcy wouldn't have been surprised if they did.

Darcy ignored Clint as best she could, scrolling through her dash and checking to see when her lit assignment was due. She heard Erik muttering curses that didn't sound English, and which were almost certainly directed at Clint, SHIELD, and the government in general. After about twenty minutes of the otherwise oppressive silence, with Darcy still not entirely certain she wasn't going to be hauled off and arrested at any moment, she pulled her iPod from her handbag and tried to drown everything out with the Hush Sound. It almost worked, but not really.

—

Jane finally came in just before ten, her arrival heralded by a very loud one-sided argument.

"I don't know what you think we're doing here, but I can't do field work from the lab. That's the whole point of coming out here to do _field work_."

She was escorted in by both Coulson and Sitwell, the former looking like he was only half-listening, and the latter looking like he wasn't listening at all. Darcy wondered how many other scientists these guys had jerked around to have got so good at it.

"It's for your own safety, Dr Foster," Coulson said, his voice even and calm in that way that suggested he was about ten seconds from being done with the conversation.

"Hey, can you guys tell Rambo here to take a chill pill?" Darcy asked, jerking her thumb to Clint, who was still as pent up as ever.

Sitwell and Coulson both exchanged a glance that seemed to encompass an entire conversation in the span of about a second. They were clearly the guys SHIELD sent out specifically to jerk around scientists.

"Seriously, we're fine," Jane insisted, letting herself be led back to the kitchen by Coulson, while Sitwell moseyed on over to Darcy's work station.

"So. Loki," Darcy said, going for casual and missing by a mile.

"Yeah. You all right?" Sitwell asked. He was a little bit better at personable than Coulson was, Darcy thought. And that went a long way.

"Not gonna lie. I'm kinda freaked out," Darcy admitted. She wound her headphones back round her iPod and shoved the whole thing back into her bag.

"You're doing better than Dr Foster," Sitwell said. He didn't seem to take anything seriously, which Darcy really liked about him. Sitwell seemed to think everything was funny. Maybe in another life, they could have been friends.

"Yeah, well. I'll be honest, I only took this gig because it was supposed to be a relaxing three months away from campus bullshit. So not living up to my expectations." Darcy had heard of internships from hell. They were practically a staple of any degree. But this was turning into hell on top of Armageddon.

She leaned back in her seat, not even caring about the argument going on in the kitchen. It was the same thing she'd heard before, with Jane being pissed, and Coulson being stoic, and no-one getting anything done.

"At least you're getting paid," Sitwell said.

Darcy laughed, at first incredulously, and then almost hysterically. "No, I'm not," she said, putting her head down on her desk. She wanted to cry. "I'm not even a month in, and I'm so sick of ramen and white rice. I just blew my last fifteen bucks on a pizza last night." A pizza she didn't even really get to enjoy, because the psychopath she'd invited into her room ate most of it.

She heard something tick against the desk by her ear, and when she looked up she found a plain blue credit card with her name on it.

"What's this?" she asked, picking it up. "Are you guys paying me?" That would just be too good to be true. She was half-expecting Sitwell to take the card back.

"No," he said. Of course. "Compensation. For the travel restrictions. The grocery store's still open. And the pizza place. Anything else, you can get online like everyone else."

"Fucking seriously?" Darcy still couldn't believe it. She turned the card over in her fingers, looking at the fine print just to assure herself it was real.

"Three hundred dollars a month. It won't let you go over, so don't try." Sitwell put a plain white envelope down on the desk next to her as well. When Darcy picked it up, she found a sheet of paper with all the relevant card information.

"Dude, you are my new favourite person ever." She wasn't even exaggerating. She didn't have to. "Wait. You said 'a month.' Does that mean we're stuck on house arrest for longer?"

Sitwell's expression turned just the smallest bit more serious. "If it comes to that, yes. We're hoping it doesn't."

There were so many things he wasn't saying, and so many things he didn't have to.

"You know, I like you, Sitwell," Darcy said, bobbing her head. "You're one of them, but you're honest. I appreciate that. Especially right now."

"You say that now," Sitwell said. It tore at something in Darcy's chest, that he had to ruin it like that. "But you should play poker with me. There's good money in the tournaments."

Darcy laughed. She couldn't help it. She didn't know if it was true or not, but she didn't care. She needed to laugh, with everything else going on. Nothing about any of it was even remotely funny.

"Hey, can you do me a really big favour?" she asked, dropping her voice down so Clint the Prison Guard wouldn't hear her. "I'm pretty useless here today, and I have got a mountain of homework to get through. Can you give me a ride back to the hotel?"

Sitwell looked up toward the kitchen, where even Erik and Clint had gravitated toward. Jane wasn't on the verge of shouting anymore, but Erik sounded like he was. Darcy definitely wouldn't be getting any work done anyway, at this rate.

"Yeah, let's go before the plates start getting thrown," Sitwell said.

Darcy quickly gathered her things and closed out the browser on the computer and followed Sitwell out to the giant black SUV parked just outside. It was such a waste of gas and healthy air to drive it three blocks, but Darcy was done arguing the point already. If SHIELD were going to pay her $300 to do mostly nothing, she could overlook pointless rides to and from the lab.

She got into the front seat, feeling strangely tall once she was settled. She looked around, surprised at some of the things she could see from where she was sitting.

"You could totally see into other peoples' cars from here," she observed as Sitwell climbed into the driver's seat.

He flashed her an almost wicked grin. "Why do you think we like these so much?" he asked.

Darcy didn't know if he was joking or not, and wasn't sure she wanted to know. "Oh my god, you are all such creeps," she said.

Sitwell just laughed and started the engine. The drive three streets over was so quick, Darcy didn't even have the chance to start a conversation. It was the most pointless ride ever, but Darcy couldn't quite shake the feeling that Sitwell was going to see her to her door.

"You need anything else?" he asked as Darcy opened the car door to get out.

"Nope. I am good." She wasn't. Not even close, but she seemed to be faking it well enough that Sitwell didn't notice. Everyone was probably freaked, and for a moment, Darcy wondered if the whole town was on lockdown, or just the Science Club.

Before she was able to get out of the car completely, Sitwell handed her a business card. "If you need to go somewhere. Call, and we'll send an escort," he explained.

"You make it sound so kinky," Darcy said. She shimmied down onto the pavement, leaving Sitwell to laugh on his own. Darcy was exhausted, and being this close to her hotel only brought it all to the forefront. Maybe if she was lucky, she could lock herself in the bathroom and sneak a nap in.

She let herself into her room, opening the door slowly in case she was about to find something unpleasant waiting for her on the other side. The only thing she found was Loki passed out on the bed, with her box of cocoa puffs beside him, opened and probably empty. The DVD had gone back to the menu screen, but there was no telling when he'd fallen asleep.

As Darcy turned to lock the door, she noticed the curtains were wide open. A rush of panic shot up her spine as she rushed to snap them shut, tugging awkwardly and swearing at the way everything caught and didn't quite close as smoothly as it could have done. It woke Loki, and he was on his feet in an instant, nay-naying at her again. He took the curtains from her and opened them, talking to her in his weird almost-Russian-but-not-really sounding gibberish again.

"Seow," he said, pointing up toward the window.

Darcy looked to see where he was pointing, finding weird copper-coloured smudges all along the edge of the glass, on all four sides.

"What is that?" she asked. She looked at Loki and noticed the rag he had wrapped around his left hand. His hands had been perfectly fine when she'd left him.

"Oh my god, is that blood?" she asked. She covered her mouth, thinking she was going to be sick. "Oh, that is so gross. Why would you even?"

Loki frowned, like she'd insulted some great work of art he'd been hitherto proud of. He shook his head and started talking again, a bit more slowly this time. But it still didn't sound like anything Darcy recognised. Loki turned and pointed out the window and then waved his hand. When nothing terrible happened, he shrugged, as if whatever he'd done should have been obvious.

Darcy shook her head. "I don't get it," she told him.

Loki frowned. He looked like he was trying to find words she might understand, but after a few moments of not finding them, he waved his hand in the clearest "fuck it" gestures Darcy had ever seen and returned to the bed. He looked defeated and pissed, which was a frankly scary look on him. Even in pyjamas. Darcy tried to ignore it and looked out the window again. And then she saw what Loki had been pointing at. They were well-hidden, but she caught one of them moving — a dark shadow on the roof across the street. SHIELD were spying on her. Of course they were.

And apparently seeing nothing. Darcy peered out the window, trying to focus on the spies as best she could. Then she looked back at Loki, who had been so confident he was safe that he fell asleep with the curtains wide open.

"How the hell did you do that?" Darcy asked.

Loki looked up at her, and then held up his rag-bandaged hand. Right.

"I don't get it, but it's gross," Darcy said. "Please don't do it to anything else."

She picked up her laptop and powered it on as she made her way back to the bed. Again, Loki was watching her every move, but at this point, she felt like she was starting to get used to being someone's closely-watched science experiment. Ignoring Loki was almost like ignoring Clint.

At least Loki didn't have a goddamn gun on him.

Darcy pulled up her email and downloaded the photos she'd taken the night before. Loki scowled at them, but he didn't look away. Shooting a glance over to him, Darcy noticed he actually looked a lot better than he had the night before. Most of the really nasty cuts and bruises around his face and neck were completely healed over. Darcy tried to remember if he'd looked like that when she left, but she'd been too busy freaking out to notice. But from where she was sitting now, the only real hint that anything was wrong at all was the patch of missing hair from the side of his head.

"Hey, can I…?"

She reached out, not really able to stop herself, and turned Loki's head so she could pull his hair back on his left side. The deep gash that had been there the night before was little more than a long, thin cut. Like a deep cat scratch, more than anything.

"Wow," she said. "That's looking really good."

Loki turned his head, making it clear that he was done letting her touch him. His expression had soured and he leaned back a bit, putting some more distance between them. Darcy wasn't going to argue.

Instead, she pulled up Tumblr and put the pictures into a photo post, accompanying it with her account of events. She left out the part about the giant robot, but admitting that Loki was wanted by the police, and that the reason she wasn't handing him in was because the damage done to him in the photos had been done by the police.

In the end, the post was about a mile long. It was exactly the sort of thing Tumblr would circulate like wildfire.

But rather than posting it right away, and tipping her hand, she dated it for five o'clock the next day. Either she'd be around to change the date forward by another day, or she wouldn't and she'd give SHIELD something huge to try to sweep under the rug.

She wasn't really sure which one scared her more.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	7. Chapter 7

Loki was watching her again. Darcy tried to ignore him as she pretended to be doing nothing hilariously illegal and dangerous and stupid. She was just any normal college student slacking on her internship and homework. Nothing at all unusual here. Nope.

But he was watching her, and not looking away. And not like he'd been watching her, either. There was a sharpness to him that wasn't there before. It wasn't that lost confusion she was getting used to seeing on him. It was curiosity. Curiosity and the expectation of an explanation. Because he apparently hadn't realised yet that she couldn't understand a single word he said.

Darcy managed to ignore him for about five seconds more before feeling like she was going to go a little insane from him watching her.

"It's the internet," she said, feeling stupid for trying to explain it to him, but not really sure what else to do. "Theoretically, it's a useful tool for sharing ideas and information, but really you just use it to get into trouble one way or another."

That confused look was back. Great. At least this was familiar territory.

"Trouble with your mom because your horrible ex posts your naked pictures all over Facebook, or trouble with your job because your boss finds your blog post about how trashed you got over the weekend and how hungover you were on your shift on Monday. Trouble with the government because you admit to harbouring a dangerous criminal in your hotel room."

Loki glared at her, or maybe at her computer. Darcy wasn't sure which it was, but she didn't like it. It reminded her just how dangerous Loki was. There was nothing benign about him in that moment. Even if it wasn't open rage, it was still the sort of look someone gave you right before they ground your face into the pavement. Just like the giant robot ground Thor into the pavement. If that thing had a proper face, it would have glared at Thor like Loki was glaring at her.

Darcy looked away quickly, hunching into herself and trying to block her peripheral vision with her shoulder. When she dared to peek back again, Loki was already occupied with digging the last of the Cocoa Puffs from the box. Darcy hadn't even opened that box yet, and now Loki had eaten them all. That just figured. Watching Loki out of the corner of her eye, Darcy began to wonder what else he'd got into or messed up in the few hours she was gone.

"I should be pretty PO'ed about that," Darcy said with a sigh. "You're lucky SHIELD paid me today. I'll have to max out my limit before I'm arrested and thrown in jail forever, I guess."

Loki looked up at her again, this time more slowly. He shifted, like he was tempted to move away from her, but some pull of manly dignity prevented him from actually moving.

"Yeah, I ain't even sorry," Darcy said, finding her ire manifesting in a strange sort of courage. "Your candy ass showing up here means everything is so fucked up that I need to be driven three blocks to work. Three blocks in those big, stupid SUVs. I thought that tree-hugger phase of mine a few years ago was just temporary, but I'm seriously about to have a love-in or something after that."

Loki watched her cautiously for a long moment, and for a moment Darcy actually expected him to get up and walk away if, for nothing else, to get away from the all the confusion she was creating. And if it was deliberate confusion, well. Darcy felt like she deserved to jerk someone around, with everyone else doing the same to her.

"What?" Loki asked finally.

Darcy jumped so hard she nearly fell off the bed. "Holy shit, you speak English!" she said.

Loki looked just as surprised as she felt. He started saying something else, but when it wasn't anything like English, the surprise was replaced by that same annoyed look he'd worn earlier.

"I guess not," Darcy said. It must have just been a fluke. "Hey, wait a minute. When did you start understanding me?"

Loki looked like he was going to answer that, but shrugged and shook his head instead.

Darcy was positive he hadn't understood a word that was said to him the night before. He'd just stared blankly at everything, until food was introduced. That was about when he started to get a bit more responsive, at least. But even that morning, Darcy realised she'd been able to reason with him, and even sort of managed to communicate back and forth. He let her go into the lab. He must have understood some of what she'd said to him, then.

"Hey, can you write?" Darcy asked.

Loki's face lit up and he said, "yow," which Darcy was pretty sure meant yes in Space Viking. She put her laptop aside and got up to fetch her book bag from where it lived by the door. Hoping like hell this would work, she brought it up to the bed and dug out a notebook and a pen and handed both to Loki.

"Here, maybe we can do it this way," she suggested hopefully.

Loki nodded and started to write, but stopped after the first few letters. "Ah," he said, sounding weirdly defeated. Looking over at the page, Darcy saw why.

"That's not English," she said flatly.

It would just figure that Space Vikings wrote with runes. Loki tossed the notebook aside and rolled his eyes as he said something else. Whatever it was, he sounded pretty certain.

"That's what they did to you, wasn't it?" Darcy asked uneasily.

Loki looked back at her, as if to warn her against this line of enquiry.

"I looked it up. After you fell asleep," she said, ready to jump away if she needed to. She wasn't even sure why she was still talking, but it felt like something she needed to say. "Where they cut you on your…" She motioned up toward her own head, but couldn't actually bring herself to say the words. "That's where the language centres are. On a human. And you guys look like us, so you're probably the same on the inside."

Loki laughed, high-pitched and without mirth. It was more a sound of desperate incredulity than anything, but Darcy couldn't really understand why. She thought she was starting to get things pretty figured out, but maybe she was just as clueless about it all now as she was when Thor first fell out of the sky.

Loki looked down at his hands, turning them over as if examining them. He pulled off the rag from where he'd wrapped it around his left hand, revealing a half-healed slice across his palm. That had definitely not been there that morning, and was far more healed than it should have been for only being a few hours old. Watching him examine himself, Darcy noticed that his wrists had completely healed as well. There wasn't a trace of any of the mess the handcuffs had left behind.

"Holy shit, no wonder the Vikings thought you guys were gods," Darcy mused aloud. She almost wanted to reach out and touch him, just to be sure, but she didn't dare. "I'm almost ready to believe it myself."

Loki looked up at her again, the ghost of a devilish little smirk on the corners of his mouth.

"Almost," Darcy said firmly. "I'm still not sold."

Loki shrugged. He started talking to her slowly, like he was picking his words with care. About one in every ten or so was in English, or sounded like it was in English, but only ever very small words. It wasn't anything substantial enough for Darcy to even glean the greater context of what he was saying, but she listened quietly. If nothing else, she didn't want to risk pissing him off by interrupting him. When he spoke slowly, the language didn't sound quite so Russian anymore. But it was a lot of rolled R's, and weird noises in the back of the throat. It was almost kind of pretty.

When he finished, he gave Darcy the sort of smile that suggested he'd just played a terribly mean joke on her, but wasn't going to tell her what it was.

"Fuck, that wasn't just some sort of magic spell or something, was it?" Darcy asked, starting to back away from him again.

Still smiling, Loki shook his head. "No."

Darcy was not amused. "You're an asshole, you know that? I don't know what you just said, but if it was some magic spell for something, I'm tasing you in the balls."

Loki only shrugged, still smiling.

"Well, asshole. Listen. I could get into a lot of trouble because of you," Darcy said. She looked over her shoulder, still not trusting the open window.

"The plan was to drop your annoying ass out in the desert tonight." She turned back to him, trying not to let her complete despair at that plan falling through show on her face.

Loki didn't say anything in return. The way he raised his eyebrows said everything he needed to.

"Yeah. That's your fault. Remember what I said about having to get a ride into the lab?" Darcy asked. She turned to point out the window at the not-so-theoretical agents ostensibly perched outside for her safety. "This place is crawling in government spooks because you—" she pointed at Loki, wanting to poke him in the chest, but not quite having the nerve "—blew up half the town." She waved her hand at the window, which gave a nice view of the giant robot's destruction path. "And now you're back! And they're worried you're back to finish what you started and kill us all."

Loki shook his head. "No," he said. And then he said something else that didn't sound like anything, but by the tone and inflection might have been "not _you_." If it was what he said, Darcy didn't want to even think about why she might have been exempt from Loki's next murderous rampage.

"Please don't kill anybody," Darcy said, a bit more quietly than she'd meant to. "I didn't… I didn't mean to bring you here and help you. I didn't want to. I still don't want you here. When I pulled over, I thought you were just some guy, and then I saw…" she waved her hand in Loki's general direction. "I saw everything, and kinda freaked out. What they did was fucked up, but so was what you did. But that doesn't make any of it right. I shouldn't have helped you, and now I can't take it back. But I can't roll on you either, because you'll just go right back there, and they'll probably be even worse."

She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and tried to dry her eyes with the heels of her hands. She wouldn't start crying in front of him. She couldn't. If she did that, she'd never be able to look him in the eye again. He'd know how terrified of him she was, and that was the last thing she needed. When she finally looked back up, Loki was watching her again, all cold consideration as he studied her with his arms crossed over his chest. He started talking again, the same even, measured tone as before. Darcy really wished she could understand what he was saying, because it sounded important.

He stopped suddenly, as if realising something mid-sentence. Darcy was tempted to remind him that she couldn't understand a word he said, but he started talking again. This time, a question by the sound of it.

Darcy shrugged and shook her head. "I don't speak Space Viking," she said. "I have no idea what you're saying."

Loki frowned. Several times, he looked like he was about to say something, but thought better of it at the last second. Finally, he tapped himself on the chest. "Loki," he said, before motioning expectantly to Darcy.

"Oh. Uh, Darcy," she said. It took her a few moments to notice the expectant look Loki still wore. "Darcy Lewis." She wasn't sure if she should have told him that. She'd seen enough fantasy movies to know that names held power, and that telling Loki her name was probably the dumbest thing she'd done yet.

"Darcy Lewis," Loki repeated. Then he spoke again, reaching out toward her. Darcy closed her eyes and tensed, trying to look away. But all Loki did was straighten her glasses on her face before pulling his hand back.

Looking at him sitting cross-legged on the other side of the bed, with that less-than-innocent smile on his face, Darcy just knew that telling him her name had been yet another in a very long line of mistakes.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	8. Chapter 8

Darcy kept looking out the window, paying more attention to what was going on outside it than what was going on in her book. Neither Victorian sexual repression nor Mormon sexual ignorance was able to hold her attention for more than a few seconds at a time. She'd given her laptop to Loki, because he seemed curious, and keeping him entertained and happy seemed beneficial to her health. It had taken him all of two minutes to somehow find Tumblr's porn tags. Either he was very lucky with random clicking, or the bastard could read English.

Whichever it was, Darcy ignored it for the most part. He was being quiet and not staring at her, so as long as he kept his hands out of his pants, she was happy to let him do whatever the hell he wanted. Both his hands were busy anyway. He'd got the hang of using the laptop's track pad pretty easily, and used his right hand to scroll, while he kept snapping his fingers with his left. At first, Darcy thought he was trying to get her attention for something, but he kept doing it, again and again, with no rhythm or pattern. He was probably nervous. Somehow, knowing he was out of his own element and in way over his head made him a little easier to be around.

The people outside were a different matter entirely. They weren't even doing anything really. But just their presence — knowing they were out there, probably trying to watch what she was doing made it impossible to do anything. She couldn't think. She could even pretend to be doing her homework.

"Are you sure they can't see us?" Darcy asked. The answer seemed obvious, but obvious hardly meant anything. Especially lately.

Loki stopped snapping his fingers and looked up, turning to glance out the window. "They can't," he said easily. His English was slowly but steadily getting better, like the more he used it, the more it seemed to sink in.

Darcy looked out the window as well, leaning forward and craning about to try to see what she could of the people on the roof across the street. "Can they hear us? What if they're listening in?"

"They can't." He looked down at his hand and snapped his fingers some more, like he was expecting something to happen.

He and Thor were royalty, apparently. Maybe that's how they summoned servants or food or whatever they needed. Just thinking about that made Darcy remember her pathetic dinner and lack of any real breakfast.

"I'm hungry. Are you hungry?" she asked.

"I could eat," he said, not even looking up from the post after post of guy-on-guy blowjobs he was scrolling through.

Darcy set her book aside and got up to dig through the boxes of cheap, over-processed food she'd brought with her. Some macaroni, ramen, rice. The mini-fridge wasn't much better. Just a few cans of Pepsi, half a gallon of milk, and some left-overs from Izzy's which were starting to become seriously questionable.

"I don't have much," Darcy told him. She did, however, have $300 from SHIELD. "I can try to go shopping. They should let me do that."

Loki looked up at her, looking like he was trying to pick his words with care. "What was that you had brought in last night?" As long as he used small words, he didn't seem to code-switch very much. The fact that he was speaking at all was a goddamed miracle in Darcy's opinion, though.

"Pizza's expensive and I'm broke. I can't afford it every night," she told him. Loki frowned, like her answer was not what he wanted to hear.

"Let me go shopping," Darcy said, trying not to sound like she was begging. She got up and went to fetch her handbag. "Sitwell said the store is still open, and it's just right up on the next corner. I can get a lot with the money they gave me."

Loki stared at her, his suspicion plain on his face. Maybe she was projecting, but Darcy thought he looked scared. If he was, she couldn't really blame him.

"If I go to the store, I can get a lot more stuff for the same amount of money. I don't get paid, so when I do have money, I have to make it all count." She pulled her phone and the card Sitwell had given her from her bag, but didn't dial the number yet. She wanted to make sure he agreed with the plan before she did anything, in case his disagreement turned violent.

"You're a slave?" Loki asked her.

Darcy snorted. "Yeah, pretty much. It's legal because they're 'paying me with experience,'" she said, making air-quote around the bullshit part of that sentence. "SHIELD gave me three hundred bucks, man. That's enough to feed a family of four for about a month. If they eat cheaply."

Loki narrowed his eyes at her, but said nothing. Darcy wondered if he said nothing because he knew anything he wanted to say would just come out in Space Viking.

"Just let me call Sitwell and see if I can get out of having to be escorted to the store," she said. "I'll be gone like, twenty minutes. Okay?" She held up Sitwell's card in one hand and her phone in the other, still waiting for him to agree to it.

After a long moment of staring at her with his face completely unreadable, Loki finally nodded. He didn't seem happy about it, but Darcy ignored that and dialled Sitwell's number, surprised when he picked up almost immediately.

"Hey, Sitwell, buddy," Darcy greeted as she turned away from Loki so she didn't have to see him glaring at her. "I need to go shopping, and the store's like, right there. I can almost see it from my window. Do I really need to have someone drive me there?"

"It's for your safety, Miss Lewis," Sitwell said.

Darcy expected as much from him.

"What about the guys across the street? The ones watching me from the roof? Are they for my safety too?" she asked.

Sitwell didn't respond right away, but she was pretty sure she heard him pull the phone away from his ear and make an annoyed sound.

"Seriously, dude. This place is crawling with Men in Black, and I've got enough carbon guilt as it is. I still can't believe I had to ride in with Clint this morning. Which, between you and me, that guy could use a vacation." She turned around, unable to really stop herself from grinning at the look of utter perplexion on Loki's face.

On the other end of the line, Sitwell sighed. "Just to the store?" he asked.

"Yeah. I'm like, totally sick of ramen, and I've got all this SHIELD money burning a hole in my pocket," Darcy said, starting to feel like this might actually work.

"Make it quick," Sitwell told her.

Darcy grinned even wider. "Thanks, dude. I'll get you a candy bar or something."

"That won't be necessary," Sitwell told her, just before the line went dead. Darcy wiggled in a little victory dace as she put her phone and the card back in her bag.

"Mission accomplished," she told Loki.

Loki started to ask a question, but he didn't get any further than "Are you" before English failed him. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, Darcy waiting patiently for him to start again.

"Are you like this with all of your masters?" he asked finally.

Darcy laughed as she picked up the big canvas bag that held her knitting and dumped it out on the bed. "No, what are you talking about?" she asked.

Loki rolled his eyes so hard, it looked like it hurt.

"Okay, I'll be back as soon as I can. I promise," Darcy told him. She didn't wait for Loki to give her his leave, or whatever it was royalty did. She left the room as quickly as she could without being suspicious. Once the door was locked behind her, Darcy waved up to the guys on the roof, just to annoy them. She walked up the road to the tiny grocery store on the next corner, definitely feeling like this was a completely different town to the one she'd first arrived in at the beginning of term. It had never been a terribly loud, busy place to begin with, but it was starting to get that ghost town vibe. Even places that weren't damaged by the giant robot were starting to close down. But the pizza place was still open. Darcy stopped as she came up next to it and sighed to herself. Maybe she could buy her prolonged survival through delicious, garlicy crust. After all, they did say the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. Maybe the same held true for the way to whatever it was that made someone not want to kill you when you stopped being useful.

—

Darcy ran out of space in her bag before she even came close to maxing out her card limit, which she took as a good sign. A small good sign, but she needed anything good she could get.

$50 bought a lot of sandwich meats, bread, tinned soups, and pasta. There was even a tiny "deli counter" with a few ready-made sandwiches and some cooked chicken, which seemed like a good idea. She wasn't sure how long it would last, and wasn't counting on it sticking around for very long. Thor had been a bottomless pit, and she had no reason to expect Loki to be any different.

On her way back, she picked up the pizza she'd ordered — topped with a little bit of everything — and made very quick tracks back to her room.

"Hey, it's me," she said as she walked into the room.

Loki made no move to get up and help her, but he did at least seem happy to see her. Or at least, what she was carrying.

"I thought you said—"

"Yeah, well. You seemed so heart-broken over it, I changed my mind," she said. She put the pizza down on the bed in front of him so she could empty out her bag. "And leave me more than one piece this time."

Loki was already getting into the pizza, giving it a dubious look. "This one's different," he said.

"Yeah, it's also more expensive, so be nice to me," Darcy told him, not looking up from where she was filling her fridge. She brought the chicken over to the bed, hoping to use it to tempt Loki away from the pizza so she could get to it while it was still hot. It worked, seeming to distract him immediately.

"What have you done to it?" he asked, picking up the crispy-fried drumstick and examining it like it might spring out and bite him.

"I didn't do anything to it. It's delicious. Just eat." Darcy turned the pizza box around so she could use the inside of the lid as a table, putting a few slices of pizza and some of the chicken on it for herself.

"I will not be told what to do by a slave," Loki said, picking the breading from the chicken and sniffing at it.

Darcy snorted and swallowed her pizza quickly. "Yeah, well. This is my room, and if you don't like it, you can walk."

Loki gave her a sideways glare and put the bit of torn-off chicken into his mouth. He apparently decided he liked it after that, and started eating with more zeal. Darcy watched him for a few moments, still managing to be amazed at how much Asgardians could put away, before her attention drifted back out the window.

"So why'd you do it?" she asked before she could stop herself.

Loki slowly looked over at her. "Do what?" he asked, but it was clear by the look on his face that he knew exactly what Darcy meant.

"Bring your giant robot down here. Blow up the town. Try to kill everyone. Take your pick." The bitterness and resentment poured out of her suddenly. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, trying to interrogate Loki, but she didn't really care. She needed to know.

Loki's gaze slowly shifted out the window as well, like he was seeing what was out there for the first time. Darcy thought she could see a flash of genuine guilt flash over his face, but if that's what it had been, it was replaced by anger. Not an immediate anger, but a distant one, like he was thinking of something that had pissed him off.

"The price for treason is death," Loki said. His voice was hard and menacing, and Darcy couldn't help but shift away from him. "Thor was banished here for crimes against Asgard and Jotunheim. I sent the Destroyer to end a conspiracy against the throne. Had Thor's friends not disobeyed a direct command, none of this would have happened."

The giant robot on steroids would be called the Destroyer. Of course it would be. What else could it have possibly been called? Darcy almost wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry. She wasn't sure.

"I guess that didn't work out so well," she muttered, trying to bury her words in her pizza. It also didn't work so well, going by the glare on Loki's face.

"I was betrayed," he spat out. "Overthrown and cast out." He wasn't even looking at her any more. His glare was fixed toward the window, at some point beyond out on the road. It might have all been a lie, but it didn't seem like it. He seemed legitimately pissed off. But then again, taking everything the so-called God of Lies said as face value seemed like a really dumb thing to do.

"You hurt some people. No-one died, thankfully. We saw the thing coming and were able to evacuate. But it still hurt people. And broke a lot of things. They're calling you a terrorist." Loki hardly seemed to hear what she said, but she didn't care. He was stuck here just as much as she was, and maybe she could use that to make him listen. "You deserve to be in jail for what you did, I think," she went on. And Loki did look at her then, focusing all that anger and rage at her. It made her want to disappear into the floor, being under the weight of that stare.

"But you won't go to jail if they find you again," she said, trying to gather her nerves back. He didn't seem to be getting any calmer, which wasn't helping. "What they already did to you… We have a big problem with that right now. You're not human, so. So human rights don't apply. If they find you again, they'll cut you open and grow bits of you in jars, and justify it because you're dangerous. Because they can prove you're not human, so they don't have to play by all the rules."

Loki shifted his attention back out the window, and Darcy could see his eyes tracking something. Probably the agents across the street. His expression slowly softened to what Darcy was pretty sure was heavily-masked fear. Like he was trying to keep himself as neutral as possible.

"What do you hope to gain by aiding me?" he asked finally.

Darcy considered telling him that she was hoping he wouldn't kill her; that he'd feel so honour-bound to let her live because she helped him. But she didn't. He might kill her just to be contrary.

"Nothing, I guess," she said. "But what they want to do with you isn't right. That's why I'm studying politics — so I can maybe change things. There was a case a few years ago — all over the news. These cops beat the shit out of this kid, and got away with it because the kid was a mutant. The judge actually said that the kid was potentially dangerous and that the cops had used justifiable force. He was fourteen years old, and he'd supposedly stolen a soda from a convenience store. Even if he actually had, that shit's fucked up. It's getting better, but we've still got a long way to go."

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Their lunch sat forgotten in front of them as they both looked out the window. Puente Antiguo was so quiet and still, even in the middle of the afternoon. What little activity was going on in town was either the few residents who were left packing up to leave, or SHIELD hanging around to make sure no pissed off Norse maybe-gods came down and tried to kill anyone.

"You did this," Darcy said finally. "Jane's gonna stick around until the end of the term, or SHIELD makes her leave. Whichever comes first. The town's so fucked up that no-one can see the point in rebuilding. If I get caught helping you, I'm gonna go to jail forever. I won't even be a martyr for the cause, because SHIELD will cover it up and no-one will know what happened." She looked over at Loki, her out-pouring bringing with it the courage to say even more than she'd ever planned.

"I just want you gone," she told him flatly. "I want you far away from here, where no-one will ever see you or connect you to me."

Loki looked down at his hands and snapped his fingers a few times. "I can't," he said. "I am unwelcome on Asgard, and cannot travel to the other realms from here."

Darcy watched him; watched him snap his fingers and turn his hands over to examine them. "Why not?"

Loki smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. It was all rueful and sad. "I can't even make sparks. I have lost everything."

He snapped his fingers a few more times and gave up with a shrug. When Thor was there, he talked about his mortal body, like it wasn't his own. And then there was the magic lightning and that hammer, and he could do things most mutants couldn't even do. It was almost like…

"Shit, they gave you the cure, didn't they?" Darcy realised. Loki didn't seem to know what she was talking about, but she remembered seeing that puncture wound on his neck. It was gone now, but it had definitely been there the night before. "It… It takes away everything that makes mutants special. It makes them human."

Loki sat quietly for a few moments before very calmly getting up. He walked into the bathroom and not-so-calmly slammed the door behind himself. Darcy listened for the sounds of destruction, but nothing came. Just silence.

She looked down at their college student lunch and decided to start putting everything away. Suddenly, she wasn't very hungry.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	9. Chapter 9

Her knitting had already been spread out over the bed, so the decision to ignore everything else and work on that came easily. All she'd brought with her from home was her scrap project — dozens of ugly garter-stitched squares in whatever colour she plucked out from the mess, to eventually be sewn together into an ugly mess of a blanket. But even that, she couldn't focus on for more than a few seconds at a time. SHIELD were spying on her from every angle, Loki had locked himself in the bathroom and refused to come out, and she was still behind on her reading. Not even her distracting procrastination could distract her from everything. She was half starting to wish that SHIELD would just get it over with and arrest her already so she could stop freaking out about what would happen when they finally busted her door in.

After getting through ten stitches in about an hour, Darcy gave up on her knitting as well. She tossed it down to the mess of yarn tangled at the foot of the bed and got to her feet. The curtains were still wide open, showing no changes at all outside. Darcy looked out at the street, trying to ignore the big, burnt gouge running down the length of the pavement and the hollowed-out remains of Izzy's diner. In her effort to ignore as much as she could, her eyes eventually slid over the smudges on the edge of the window. Now that she was actually looking at them, they weren't random smudges at all, but writing. Runes, written in blood, and now dried to a sickening rust colour. She could see fingerprints in the writing, like he'd sliced his hand open and finger-painted with the result.

Ew.

It must have hurt, though. She'd seen the cut on his hand, a long line across his entire palm. Darcy wasn't even sure what he'd used to cut himself open like that, but she also wasn't so curious that she felt a burning need to go looking. She began to wander aimlessly around the small room, looking for anything to occupy herself. None of her DVDs looked interesting, and even though the room was starting to become a bit cluttered and crowded, she wasn't really in the mood to clean any of it up. She quickly found herself standing by the bathroom door, looking at the small sliver of yellow light that shone through the gaps along the edges.

"Hey," she called out, tapping on the door with her fingers. "You okay in there?"

Loki didn't respond. Darcy leaned closer to the door, trying to see if she could hear anything. But it was completely silent on the other side. She wondered if she should let herself in, but it was a fleeting thought. Who knew what she'd find on the other side. Or what sort of mood she'd find Loki in. It obviously wasn't going to be a good one, either way.

"Do you need anything?" she asked.

She was still met by silence. The thought crept into her mind that maybe he wasn't all right on the other side of the door, and Darcy had no idea how to deal with that possibility. What if he'd hurt himself in there? Deliberately? What if he still had whatever he'd used to slice his hand open?

"Say something. Please," Darcy said. Loki said nothing. "If you don't say something to let me know you're in one piece, I'm coming in."

"Leave me be," Loki said stiffly.

Darcy couldn't believe how relieved she was to hear him say anything at all. He sounded like he was right up next to the door, so even if she did try to get in, she'd have to push him out of the way.

"Do you want to watch a movie?" she asked, not particularly hopeful.

"No," Loki said. Darcy had sort of expected as much.

"All right. Well. I reserve the right to kick you out when I have to pee." She wasn't sure why she was trying to draw him out in the first place, but it wasn't working anyway. Loki didn't even respond to her this time, giving a pretty clear signal that he was staying put. Darcy left him there and went back to the bed. Maybe if she was lucky, something else would fall out of the sky and distract SHIELD. Or maybe just crush the hotel. Either one would probably solve all her problems.

But nothing fell from the sky, and all her problems still remained, so Darcy turned on the television and started flipping through the eight channels again and again until she got bored enough to leave it in one place. The PBS show on painting and decorating wasn't going to solve her problems either, but it was at least background noise. Something to drown out the paranoid buzz in her mind.

She got through two painfully slow rows on her square, at one point having to turn on the light. By the time Loki finally wandered out of the bathroom and sat down on the floor, the sun had gone down behind the mountains completely. Darcy expected him to be a mess, all red-eyed and sticky from having a silent, manly cry, but he looked almost scarily calm. He didn't seem to really be interested in anything around him, and just stared out the window at the darkening sky.

"We need a plan," Darcy said after a moment.

Loki shrugged indifferently. "Is it permanent?" he asked. He spoke evenly, like he was trying to keep all emotion out of his voice. Like he'd just been told he only had six weeks to live.

"I don't know," Darcy answered honestly. She put her knitting down so her attention didn't seem quite so divided. "I'm not even sure that's what they did. I mean. You're talking fine. You're hardly even code-switching. If they'd done that to me, what they did to you, I'd never recover. You don't even have a scratch on you."

He looked down at his hands again, frowning at them like something was wrong with them. From where Darcy was sitting, they looked fine. Just a long cut along his left one that was almost completely gone already. She wondered if that was a power, or just natural biology. But something about his hands was deeply interesting to him for some reason. It was like he'd never seen them before, the way he was looking at them, fingers held straight out as he examined ever inch of his hands and forearms. He seemed to almost get lost in concentration, until whatever he was looking for was clearly not to be found, and he gave up in frustration.

"You said you can't make sparks. Do you mean like…" Darcy wasn't sure what she meant, but Loki had made it sound like the most important thing in his life.

"Not anyone can learn magic. You must have an innate talent for it," Loki said. He looked away, focusing on a point of the floor far to his right. "I once exhausted my magic entirely. I nearly met my death." He inhaled deeply and grit his teeth so hard, Darcy could hear it from across the room.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Well, even last night, you didn't seem like you were gonna die. Pass out, maybe, but…" She shrugged, not really sure where to go with that. It seemed like there was more to it than he was telling her, but she wasn't going to push. She wasn't even sure why he was telling her this much. She wasn't sure she even wanted to know.

"We still need a plan," she said. "They're getting really antsy, and it won't be long before they find you."

Loki buried his face in his hands, breathing slowly and deeply. After a few moments, he looked back up at her thoughtfully. "Can you get me to Torshaow?" he asked.

Darcy shook her head slowly. "I don't know where that is. I'm sorry."

Loki frowned. "Well. Where are we now?" he asked.

"New Mexico." Darcy felt like she was about to repeat her very first conversation with Thor. Surely, Loki at least realised he was on Earth, right?

Judging by the way his frown deepened, maybe not.

"Where's Old Mexico?" he asked.

Darcy tried to stop herself from laughing, but didn't quite succeed. "A few hours to the south. If you're looking for like, Norway or whatever, that's way on the other side of the world."

Loki threw his hands up into the air and leaned against the wall. He looked like he was about ten seconds away from giving up and just turning himself in. Maybe if he did, SHIELD or SWORD or whoever wound up with him would actually treat him like a person.

Or maybe she was completely delusional. She quickly reached back for her Laptop and pulled up Google.

"Okay, let's see if we can find it," she said. She typed in _Torshaow_ and got nothing but Twitter accounts and German soccer videos on Youtube. That probably wasn't it. Humming to herself, she highlighted the last two letters and replaced them with a U. This time, the results were social media and white pages matches.

"Do you know how to spell it?" she asked.

Loki shook his head and shrugged. "With your writing? No."

Darcy backspaced on the U, not sure what else to try. After a few seconds, Google loaded a pull-down menu of possible search queries and brought up the results for the first one on the list.

"Wait. Hey, come here. Is this it?" she asked. She waved Loki over and pointed at her screen. She didn't understand some of the IPA symbols, but some of the vowel sets definitely seemed like the rounded ones Loki used.

Loki stood up and leaned over the bed to look at the screen, with a small map of Tórshavn and the relevant Wikipedia page linked at the top. She clicked on one of the images, filling the screen with a small city nestled against a harbour with rolling green hills in the distance.

"Yes!" he said, sounding almost excited.

"How the fuck does that spell Torshaow?" Darcy wondered aloud. She started clicking on the other images, mostly interested in the brightly-coloured little Viking houses.

"Can you get me there?" Loki asked.

"That's still on the other side of the world," Darcy told him. "Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the ocean."

Loki glared down at the screen. He chewed on his thumbnail and sat down, suddenly way too close to Darcy to be comfortable. She shifted away, but he just leaned in again.

"Get me to Tórshavn. There is a path there that leads to Alfheim," he said. He took the laptop from her and moved away so he could click on the pictures he wanted to see. Darcy took the opportunity to breathe.

"What's Alfheim?" Darcy asked.

"It's where the elves live. I have allies there."

Darcy was torn between moving away and leaning closer to see which images Loki was clicking on. Ultimately, she decided on moving away, but also scooting back against the headboard so she was more or less behind him. He seemed more interested in the landscape photos, but Darcy figured that made sense. He probably wanted to make sure it was the same town he remembered.

"I think you could probably get into Canada. It's an unguarded border, because no-one suspects Canadians of trying to sneak into the country. You might have better luck getting across the Atlantic from there." Darcy couldn't believe what she was saying, but she couldn't stop herself either. She wanted him gone, and not condemned to some lab somewhere, so getting him into Canada was probably the best thing for everybody.

"Where's Canada?" Loki asked.

"A few days to the north, if you drive," Darcy said.

Loki looked over at her expectantly.

"Oh, hell no. I am not driving you to Canada," Darcy said. She did move away from him now, as if he would grab her and make her drive him to Canada right then and there. "Are you nuts? You saw how much of an ordeal it was to just go to the store. I'd never get onto the highway."

Loki shifted his attention back to the laptop. "Perhaps not," he agreed. He went quiet for a few minutes while he clicked on more pictures. "No, I think I should stay here for a while. They're bound to lose interest eventually, and then you can take me to Canada."

Darcy frowned, feeling not for the first time like she was going to cry. "I am not taking you to Canada."

"Well, I don't know where it is," Loki pointed out.

"So look it up." Darcy leaned over and Googled Canada for him. "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Canada is north. I think you can find it on your own."

"You're very disobedient for a slave," Loki said, now clicking on pictures of Canadian wilderness.

"I'm not a goddamn slave. Quit calling me one," Darcy snapped at him. She was tempted to snatch the laptop away, but decided to sulk against the headboard instead.

"I suppose it doesn't matter. I can't leave until the guards are gone. What do you call them?" Loki looked out the window, setting an annoyed glare on the people who were presumably still up on the roof.

"SHIELD," Darcy said. "They're kind of assholes. My life was a lot less weird before they showed up."

Well. Before Thor showed up, but he was at least weird in a harmless kind of way. SHIELD were just menacing and intrusive.

"When SHIELD leaves, so shall I," Loki said. He clicked on a picture of a moose and frowned at it. "And not a moment sooner."

Darcy was starting to see the appeal of locking herself in the bathroom. At least if she did that, she wouldn't have to face a constant reminder of her own idiocy.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	10. Chapter 10

Darcy finally closed the curtains as the sun dropped behind the mountains completely, casting the entire valley in shade. She'd gone back to her knitting while Loki trawled through Tumblr some more, frowning at post after post of cat gifs. He seemed to just be going through her list of tracked tags, which was kinda creepy in a way. Darcy tried to ignore it and worked on an avocado-green square.

He kept snapping his fingers, though. Not even loudly; more like he was just trying to give his fingers a work-out or something. Loki rooting through her Tumblr account, Darcy could handle. The snapping was starting to seriously get on her nerves.

"Why do you keep doing that?" she asked finally. "Because it's really annoying."

Loki stopped and looked down at his hand. "I'm trying to make sparks," he muttered.

He'd mentioned the sparks before, and Darcy still didn't understand it. "Why is that something you want to do?" she asked.

Loki looked up at her, giving Darcy the very strong feeling that he was trying not to outright glare. "What they have taken from me is something which they should not have even been able to touch," he said. He looked down at his hands again, running his thumb over the fading cut on his hand. "They should be praying that I do not get it back, because when I do, they will beg for a swift death."

Darcy moved as far to the edge of the bed as she could without falling off. She was glad Loki wasn't even looking at her, because if he was, she probably would have pissed herself or starting crying or something. Luckily, she didn't do either.

"Please don't say things like that," she said quietly, holding her knitting close to her chest like a shield. "When you say things like that, it makes me want to… not help you."

Loki looked up at her, and something in his face changed. He was still pissed off, but he didn't look quite so genocidal. It did nothing to calm Darcy's nerves.

"You would not wish death on one who had so grievously violated you?" he asked. Not quite demanded, but close.

"No! Of course not. I don't want anyone to die," Darcy said quickly.

Loki didn't look away from her, staring at her with a terrifying intensity. Like he was looking for something that was wrong, but couldn't find it. Darcy shifted away again, nearly toppling over the edge of the bed.

"I mean. I don't know. Probably not, but I've never had anyone do anything like that to me before. A guy at a concert grabbed my tit once, and I slugged him for it, but that's it. I didn't want him dead. I just wanted him to stop grabbing my tit."

"But you carry a weapon," Loki said, his eyes falling to her handbag.

Darcy looked over at it, wondering if she could reach it before he did. She was closer, but he was bigger, and probably faster.

"For self-defence," she said. "Against creeps who think no means 'take me, I'm yours'."

Loki went quiet for a long moment, but he didn't stop staring at Darcy. After a while she started to get the feeling he wasn't even seeing her, and was just sort of staring in her direction while he got lost in his own head. Darcy stayed where she was, still trying to decide if she wanted to grab her taser and arm herself.

Finally, Loki looked away and nodded, conceding something he didn't feel like vocalising.

"I wish to bathe and would like to not wear these same clothes," he said out of nowhere.

Darcy wasn't quite sure she'd heard him right, and took a few seconds to respond. "Uh. Yeah. Just…" She pointed over to the dresser. "Help yourself. The pyjamas are probably the only thing that'll fit you, though. And there's a clean razor in my lunch box in there. I mean, you're getting kinda scruffy."

Loki rubbed his cheek as he got up to dig through the dresser. It didn't take him long to find something to wear and disappear into the bathroom. When the door clicked shut, Darcy slumped so hard that she did fall off the bed, but she didn't care. She lay on the floor, feet still up on the mattress, and hummed nervously until her chest didn't feel quite so tight. The worst part was that when he wasn't actively trying to freak her out, he was almost kinda nice. He had to have been terrified. Maybe being a major dickmunch was just his way of coping.

No. She wasn't going to defend him. He was a creep and he was dangerous, and she wanted him gone. And the sooner, the better.

She stayed on the ground, listening to Loki fight and swear at the shower (she assumed he was swearing, anyway. It sounded like swearing) for the next few minutes, not sure what to do next. Ultimately, around the time the weird Viking swearing stopped and all she could hear was the shower running, Darcy decided that what she really wanted was to sit in her pyjamas and eat left-over pizza while watching boring television. And like hell if anyone was going to stop her.

She got up, trying to balance moving quickly with moving quietly, and dug out the last pair of clean pyjamas she had. Damn. She'd have to worm her way into getting out to the laundromat too. Assuming it was even still open. Double damn. She pushed all that aside and changed as quickly as she could, never once taking her eyes off the bathroom door. The whole time, Loki didn't seem to even think about coming back into the main room, but Darcy still couldn't quite shake the feeling that she was being watched anyway. Or maybe that was just the paranoia speaking. Or the spooks across the street who had actually been trying to watch her all day.

Was it really paranoia when you had proof that someone was trying to watch you?

Whatever. She didn't care. Or at least, that's what she told herself. She didn't care, and she was going to just pretend that this was all perfectly normal. She pulled the perfectly normal pizza from the fridge and put a few slices on a perfectly normal plate, and microwaved it all with a perfectly normal shot glass full of bottled water. Loki was still in the shower by the time the microwave finished, but he could stay in there all night, for all Darcy cared. She had everything-on-it pizza, and after flipping through a few channels, Judge Judy. It was almost a perfectly normal night.

Loki took forever in the shower, and had probably used up all the hot water for the entire hotel by the time he came back out again. But at least with him taking so long, it gave Darcy a chance to calm down and collect her nerves. She looked up at him as he wandered back out, looking far less scruffy and angry than he had when he'd first gone in there.

"Dude, you were in there for almost an hour," Darcy said. She looked down at her plate, with the one room-temperature slice of pizza left on it, and slid it toward what was unnervingly becoming Loki's side of the bed. "Hungry?"

Loki sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the plate. He kept watching her, in that way that people do when they're trying not to let on that they're watching someone.

"Thank you," he said quietly. Darcy was almost surprised he knew how to say it.

"So, I was thinking. You know, while you were in there draining the desert of all its water." She looked over, but didn't seem to get any reaction from him. "You made it so those guys across the street can't look in. Why can't you, you know. Just do that to yourself and walk out?"

Loki stopped picking off all the peppers from the pizza and looked up at the window and the oppressively-patterned curtains that covered them. "It doesn't work that way. Some runes can be drawn on a person and have minimal effect, but something that complicated…" He frowned and bit into his pizza.

"What?" Darcy asked.

Loki said something that sounded suspiciously like, "I'd need a very sharp knife."

Darcy didn't want to know. Either he'd suddenly grown attached to her tiny hotel room, or he'd already run through every possibility for escape about eight times over. And he didn't exactly look thrilled to be there. She was pretty sure that if there was anything they could agree on, it was wanting him gone as soon as possible. So there was that, at least.

"Okay. Well. If you're still hungry, there's a bunch of stuff still in the fridge. I have a mountain of homework to get through, so. I'm gonna do that." Darcy sighed, not really in the mood to do her homework. But it needed to get done, with or without her little Norse problem.

She stared at her feet, in her polka-dotted socks, for far longer than necessary before reaching over to pick up her laptop to start working on her essay that was due in two days. Whoever decided that twelve credits were required for her loans and grants to go through deserved to be kicked in the face.

The course was at least an easy one. Two short essays a week on random-ass subjects, just to make sure that she knew how English worked, as far as she could tell. It wasn't that she didn't know enough about the subject to even bullshit her way through — she just didn't care enough about family holiday traditions to write anything.

Slowly, she started pecking out words at a snail's pace about how Christmas worked with her family, and how uneventful and predictable it was every year. She never got any hilarious stories about that time Auntie Marge dropped the punch bowl on the turkey, or when Cousin Jackie got drunk and threw the tree outside, or whatever. Wake up, breakfast, presents, and a day at home with her parents until Christmas dinner. So boring.

She'd actually got so caught up in writing her thousand words about Christmas that she didn't even notice Loki moving around the hotel room until she heard him laughing.

"What?" she asked.

She looked up to find Loki by the dresser with her frigging vibrator in his hands. He flicked the rabbit ears a few times before turning it over in his hands to examine the rest.

"Oh my god, no!" Darcy said. She tried to put her laptop off to the side and get out of bed, but didn't exactly manage to do it as quickly as she'd have liked. By the time she got to her feet, Loki found the power switch and just started laughing all over again.

"Not for you!" Darcy snapped as she snatched it away and turned it off. "Oh my god, what is wrong with you?"

Loki kept right on laughing. "What's the point of the rabbit?" he asked.

Darcy grit her teeth and shook her head, not sure if she should be pissed or humiliated. She was doing a pretty good job at being both, really.

"If you can't figure that out on your own, then you're not old enough to be having sex," she said.

She stuffed the vibrator back into her underwear drawer, trying to ignore the fact that Loki had been digging around in there. She was starting to think that if ignoring things were an Olympic sport, she could win the gold at this point.

"Unless I tell you it's all right to go digging through my things, you are not allowed to go digging through my things. Got it?" she said, rounding back on Loki. The son of a bitch was still giggling to himself.

"All right," he said, wandering back over to the fridge. He didn't sound terribly honest, but Darcy wasn't in the mood to get into it with him.

"Now, I have to do this stupid-ass assignment and I don't have the time to be babysitting you. I know you're bored, but you're also an adult. You can have my laptop back when I'm done, but until then just. Stay out of my stuff."

She sat back on the bed and picked her laptop back up. Of course, she'd completely lost her tenuous grip on her train of thought, and couldn't conceive of a way to squeeze another eight hundred words out of her damned essay.

"It occurs to me that we are both adults," Loki said, clearly thinking it was the smoothest line he'd ever delivered.

Darcy grit her teeth and tried not to scream. Whether she wanted to scream at him or because of him, she wasn't sure. But with that single sentence, he'd gone from being almost bearable to completely out of line all over again.

"Nope," she said stiffly. "And just for that, you're sleeping on the floor tonight."

She realised she should have made him sleep on the floor the night before, but he'd looked so pathetic and broken. It was hard to believe that was only a day earlier. And now here he was, being the biggest creep ever.

"No, you're not an adult?" Loki asked.

Darcy didn't look up from her computer screen. "No, you're not coming anywhere near me."

Just to make her point clear, she picked up the pillow next to her and threw it onto the floor.

"Do not touch this bed," she said, finally looking up to meet him in the eye. He didn't look nearly as happy as he had a few minutes ago, but she didn't care. "My house, my rules. Fucking capiche?"

Loki grit his teeth so hard, Darcy swore she could hear it. He stepped forward, and Darcy was certain she'd done the wrong thing, but it was too late to take it back now. She sat stiffly, not sure what to expect. But the only thing he did was snatch up the pillow from the ground and took it over to the far corner, where he sat and glared at his knees.

Darcy breathed in deeply as all the tension slipped away from her body, leaving a nervous relief in its wake. Loki could still do anything, and him being on the other side of the room didn't necessarily mean anything. But it was kind of comforting anyway, just having that little bit of distance between them. She just hoped SHIELD would get bored and go away very, very soon.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	11. Chapter 11

Darcy actually couldn't believe that Loki stayed off the bed. She doubted like hell that anything she'd said had intimidated him in any way, but something seemed to have worked. He hardly moved at all from his little grouch corner, which in and of itself was enough to make Darcy just a little bit paranoid that he was plotting something sinister. She saw that drawing in Erik's library book. It had practically embodied sinister, and here was the man himself slowly unravelling a sock. Darcy almost yelled at him for it, but decided he could have the damn sock. She didn't need it.

After the most painful seven hundred words she'd ever forced out, Darcy gave up on her essay and emailed it to her professor. It wasn't finished, and she couldn't even be bothered to read it over once to check for any egregious typos, but she'd take the C. She thought she deserved an A+, pass the class forever for even trying to do her coursework with an escaped lunatic in her hotel room, but she wasn't even going to try to explain that to her professor.

"Do you want my laptop?" she asked, hoping that if she kept her promises, Loki would be more inclined to let her live when he finally made his escape.

Loki barely looked up at her and shook his head. Apparently destroying the sock was more interesting, so Darcy shut down the machine. She put it down on the floor and slid it under the bed so she didn't accidentally stomp on it in the middle of the night. The clock on the bedside table said it was just barely eight in the evening, but Darcy was exhausted. She'd hardly slept the night before, and with Clint dragging her out of bed at oh-god o'clock, she was running on empty. She wanted to just go to bed, but then she caught Loki out of the corner of her eye and decided that going to bed would be stupid. But it was cold, because the heater had been built by an idiot, and no-one in New Mexico had ever heard of insulation or double-glazing. She'd turned the heat on twice, only to turn the room into a temporary sauna before the room dropped back to ridiculously cold again after she turned it off. Something buried deep in whatever survival instincts she had made her want to just curl up and sleep all through the winter. Or maybe that was just the exhaustion. Either way, it wasn't good.

Just to give herself something to do, she started flipping through channels again, not even trying to find anything. News, Spanish programming, PBS trying to get money, news, news, news, crappy sitcom, boring cop drama, and then the cycle started over.

Apparently channel-surfing through eight channels was boring enough to lull her to sleep, because at the fifth pass, the TV stopped on the Spanish programming and stayed there.

She barely registered the TV turning off, drifting somewhere being completely asleep and awake. Darcy burrowed deeper into her blankets, but the hotel was furnished with summer heat in mind, and the blankets were kind of thin and useless.

What woke her up in an instant was Loki once again invading her space and thinking that he could just cuddle with her.

"Dude, what the fuck?" She fought against him, pushing him as far away from her as possible. "I told you to stay off the bed!"

Loki rolled his eyes. "You're freezing. You're of no use to me dead," he said flatly.

"I—You—What?" Darcy said, tripping over her own tongue. It took her a moment to catch up with exactly what Loki had said, and when she did, it was like a punch to the face. She'd somehow wandered into a full-blown hostage situation and hadn't even realised it.

"Fucking oh my god, no!" she said. She sat back on her ass and started kicking at him as hard as she could, trying not to get tangled up in the blankets. "Get— off— the bed!"

Loki relented and returned to the floor to glower at her. Which was fine. He could glower all he wanted. As long as he stayed on the floor, he could do whatever the hell he wanted.

"If you freeze to death, someone will notice your absence, and when they come looking for you they will find me here," Loki said. And he sounded so irritatingly calm, too. Like he hadn't just tried to cop a feel, or whatever the fuck he thought he was doing. "In light of the situation, I would say your survival is in our mutual interest."

"Wow, no wonder they threw your ass out of Space Viking Land. It's not all about you, you know." She ignored the venomous glare Loki gave her and looked back at the clock instead. It was five in the morning already.

"I _was_ gonna try to go back to bed, but after yesterday, Clint'll probably be here early, so what's the point?" Darcy said, throwing her hands into the air. "Put a movie in."

"No," Loki said incredulously. His royal ass-ness had probably never been given an order in his life. Darcy didn't care.

"Hey, _you_—" she jabbed a finger in his direction "—just violated _me_—" she pointed at herself "—and now I'm telling you to put a fucking movie in!"

She slumped back against the headboard and glared at the wall in front of her. After a few moments of tense silence, Loki reached for the DVD book and flipped to a random page and plucked a disk from it. While he had his back turned to her, pressing every button on the DVD player about eight times until something happened, Darcy took the opportunity to grab her handbag from the floor and fish her taser out. She was back up against the headboard by the time Loki finally figured out the DVD player and got _Pirates of the Caribbean_ playing. It was actually one of Darcy's favourites, but she'd never tell Loki that. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

He turned, and his eyes caught the taser in her hand, but he said nothing.

"Come near me, and I swear I will tase the shit out of you," Darcy threatened.

Loki rolled his eyes again and sat back in his corner. For a moment, Darcy wondered if he'd even slept at all that night. She wondered why she cared.

The two of them sat in absolute silence through the movie, neither saying so much as a word to one another. And then of course, someone started pounding on the door just as Jack Sparrow shouted about blowing holes in his ship. If she wasn't so annoyed and freaked out about everything else, Darcy would have actually felt smug over being right about Clint showing up early.

She waved at Loki, barely waiting for him to hide in the bathroom before she got up and threw the door wide open to give Clint her best glare.

"Start getting ready, girlie," Clint said. He probably thought he was so clever. Darcy wondered if she could tase him and get away with it.

"Are you letting Jane go out to do science today?" she asked.

"Not yet," Clint said.

He'd probably go all ninja spy on her before she even tried to tase him. Stupid secret agents.

"No science, no Darcy," she said. She didn't want to be stuck in the room with Loki all day, but she wanted even less for him to be there alone all day. He was absolutely certifiable, and there was no telling what he'd do if left to himself for long enough.

Clint rolled his eyes. Darcy was getting real sick of people rolling their eyes at her.

"You're just gonna stay here all day?" he asked.

"Yep." Darcy held her chin up in what she hoped was a suitably defiant gesture. "The contract I signed with Jane, and not you, says I only have to be in the lab when science is happening. If I'm gonna be bored all day, I'll at least be bored in the comfort of my bed."

Clint stared at her for a long moment, before shaking his head. "Whatever. Worst mission ever."

"Worst internship ever," Darcy grumbled. She shut the door, hoping Clint would go away and not knock again. As soon as she re-locked the bolt, she nearly fell to the ground. She braced herself against the door and just focused on not hyperventilating. After that performance, she deserved an Oscar.

"When this is over, you are paying me my weight in gold," Darcy said.

Loki peered out of the bathroom. He looked around the room quickly before his eyes fell on her, where they lingered almost obscenely.

"Very well," he said. It wasn't the reaction Darcy expected, and she wasn't sure how to respond to it.

She tried to shake it off as she sat heavily back on the bed. "Well, either way, you have got to go somewhere else. This is getting way too freaky for me."

Loki walked up to the window and pushed the curtain aside to peer out. "They're back," he said quietly.

Darcy wasn't even aware that they'd left, assuming he was talking about the spooks across the street. She absolutely refused to think about the fact that Loki was pretty much just as trapped as she was. She wouldn't let him be the victim here.

Except he kind of was.

Except she wasn't thinking about that.

"You're seriously saying that you did some freaky magic thing to the window, but you can't do some freaky magic thing to yourself so you can leave?" she asked.

Loki didn't answer her. Instead, he looked at whatever freaky magic thing he'd done to the window, and frowned at it.

"I should probably refresh that, actually," he said. He didn't sound very thrilled about it, though. But if he'd done what Darcy thought he'd done, she couldn't really blame him there, either.

"What happens if you don't?" Darcy asked.

Loki shrugged. That was real encouraging.

"Okay. Well." Darcy took a deep breath and tried to sound like she didn't think she was about to say something totally stupid. "I'm gonna have some breakfast. I guess if you promise to stay on your side of the bed, you can sit up here too, so you don't have to eat on the floor."

Loki turned, and even bowed, but she was pretty sure he was mocking her. "How very gracious of you," he said. Totally mocking her.

"Yeah, well I'm still mad at you. And I meant what I said about the taser." She picked it up again, just to get the point across.

"Understood," Loki said.

Darcy waited for him to walk around the bed before she got up to go dig through the fridge. She grabbed the rest of the chicken, not even caring about the time of day, and piled it all onto one of her cheap plates. While she waited for it to heat up, she pulled the last two cans of Pepsi out and tossed one onto the bed for Loki.

"How does it work?" he asked suddenly.

Darcy wasn't sure she knew what he was talking about. "What, the microwave?" she asked.

"Your weapon. What does it do?" He was looking at the taser, on the floor by her feet, but he didn't seem like he was about to make a grab for it. She'd be able to get it faster, anyway.

"Oh, uh. It shoots these barbs into the person's skin and electrocutes the fuck out of them." She looked down at the device and almost laughed. "I used it on Thor when we first met him. Man, he went down hard."

For a second, Loki looked almost annoyed, but it was quickly chased away by something that could have been amusement. "You met Thor in combat?" he asked.

Darcy did laugh. "I knocked his ass out. And if that thing works on him, it'll work on anyone."

Loki laughed as well, and when he inclined his head this time, it seemed a little more genuine. Darcy wasn't sure what to make of that either, aside from maybe the fact that now Loki might think twice about trying to cop a feel.

The microwave beeped and Darcy pulled out the plate and put it down on the bed, not even caring that it might get a little bit of grease on the blanket. As soon as Loki was gone, Darcy was going to request full service from the housekeeping staff. And maybe suggest that they burn everything, just to be safe.

"Mmm, breakfast of champions," she said to herself as she walked back round to the far side of the bed, sitting as close to the edge as possible. Loki was doing pretty much the same, so at least there was plenty of space between them.

He held his Pepsi in his hands and turned it over a few times, examining the can.

"How do you open it?" he asked.

"Like this." Darcy showed him by opening hers. Loki nodded and copied her, seeming strangely pleased at getting it right.

When Thor learned these little things, he'd been kind of cute. Like a lost puppy who just learned a new truck. Loki just managed to look smug. Which was weird, because who looked smug about opening a can of Pepsi?

Darcy just wished he'd go away. When he wasn't freaking her out, he was confusing her, and she didn't like either.

She intended to sit back and watch the rest of her movie, but for some reason, her mouth wouldn't shut up.

"So. Any plans?" she asked.

Loki looked over at her expectantly, and she could practically see what he was thinking.

"That don't involve me driving you to Canada," she amended.

"That rather depends on what sort of distraction I can conjure up," he said distantly.

"I'm not going to be your hostage and your distraction," Darcy said.

Loki frowned. "You're my hostage?" he asked. And maybe he was just playing her, but his confusion seemed genuine. And that just made Darcy's head hurt.

"I—Yeah?" Wasn't she? Darcy didn't even know anymore.

Loki just hummed, like he was thinking that over. He picked up a piece of chicken and pulled at some of the meat, eating with his fingers like he'd grown up doing it.

"If you were my hostage, wouldn't that mean you'd have to do as I say?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not gonna," Darcy said.

"Very well." And what the hell did that mean? Since when did he start being so… agreeable? Not that it was a bad thing that he wasn't trying to freak her out, but it was still kind of freaking her out.

She pretended she hadn't heard him and picked up a wing, making a bit more of a mess than Loki did. Not that she cared.

They watched the rest of the movie in a slightly more comfortable silence. Or at least, Darcy watched the movie, while Loki started digging through the bedside table and flipping through the phone book and Bible with a mixture of distaste and curiosity. Darcy was pretty sure Loki couldn't figure out what the two had to do with one another, or why they were both left hidden away in the same drawer, but she figured she'd just let him ponder on that in silence.

When the movie was over, the player skipped right on over to _Dead Man's Chest_, and Darcy let it. She was actually starting to feel kind of tired again, but she figured that was probably because it was still stupidly early, and she'd just eaten. It also meant she was kind of dozing off again when someone knocked on the door. Loudly.

"Shit," she hissed, jumping up and wide awake.

Loki didn't even have to be told that time, and slipped back into the bathroom to hide. Darcy looked out of the little hole in the door, somehow not surprised to see Clint glaring sourly at nothing in particular. Of course it was Clint. She thought she'd made herself clear about going in, but apparently not.

She unlocked the door, and as soon as she opened it, Clint pushed his way inside with a fucking bow in his hands. Like he was some modern-day Robin Hood or something. Darcy yelped loudly as she jumped out of the way, and then actually screamed when Sitwell grabbed her.

"No, Darcy. It's okay," Sitwell said. He tried to guide her away from the door as some other bald guy in a black suit walked in. SHIELD apparently attracted bald guys.

"You're safe now," Sitwell said, trying to turn her so she couldn't see Clint with his bow, or the other guy with his gun. "The kid from the pizza place said he saw Loki here the night before last. Is he still here?"

He didn't sound like he was there to arrest her. He sounded like he was there to rescue her. Darcy almost wanted to cry. The only reason she didn't answer Sitwell was because she was afraid if she tried to say anything, she would cry.

"Gig's up, Loki. Come on out, and I'll only shoot you once," Clint said, pulling back the bowstring just a little bit more.

There was a loud crash from the bathroom, and Darcy turned quickly to see Loki holding the fucking shower rod like it was some sort of ninja stick.

"Oh my god, help," Darcy said. For a second, everything seemed to almost go green. She buried her face in her hands and wished she could just go back to before Thor ever landed in the desert. To when her life actually made sense.

"It's okay," Sitwell repeated. "You're gonna come with me, and Loki's going to go with Deems and Barton, and everything will be just fine."

Darcy wasn't sure what 'just fine' meant, but she didn't really care. She just wanted to go away. Before she could say anything, Loki shouted loudly and lunged forward. He hooked the shower rod into Clint's bow, pulling it away from him, and causing the arrow to fire into the floor. He swung the rod around, pulling Clint off balance and smashing the free end into Agent Deems' face.

Sitwell reached for his own gun and put just enough distance between himself and Darcy for Loki to grab her and pull her close. Darcy screamed as everything went very dark and very loud.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	12. Chapter 12

Darcy was pretty sure her ears popped so hard they were going to start bleeding. Which probably wasn't a good thing. She kind of liked being able to use her ears.

She expected to hear gunfire, but all she heard was just white noise screaming at her from all directions. And she couldn't see a damn thing. The first thing that registered after her eardrums nearly burst was the cold. But not the stinging cold she was used to. This was a wet, permeating cold, with sideways rain. Or maybe it only seemed sideways because someone was pressed up against her side and holding onto her like it was the end of the world. For all she knew, it was.

She managed to open her eyes to find that someone was Loki, and that no, it was definitely raining sideways. Darcy had no idea where they were, other than somewhere old. Not ancient old, but still. Kinda old. Red brick buildings with white stone arches everywhere, and the street was actually made of cobblestone. She and Loki stood just underneath a bridge that looked like the kind of place people went to get mugged. Or thrown under a train, she realised. They were standing right on the tracks, which were pressed down into the road.

"What the fuck? Where are we?" Darcy asked. She looked around, but all she really noticed was that they were at least lucky enough that only a few people were around to see them apparently appear out of nowhere. And most of them were too busy paying attention to the dog dressed up as Elvis, howling along while his owner strummed out _Hound Dog_ on his guitar. If anyone did notice, they didn't seem to care.

"I don't know," Loki said. His voice sounded wrong. Looking up at him, Darcy saw why. He looked like he had been thrown under a train. He was almost as bad as when she'd first picked him up, only without the blood. She was pretty sure he was about to puke, actually.

Well, great. She tried to nudge him over to the low platform behind them, if for no other reason than to get them off of the tracks and back out of the rain. He stumbled against her and nearly tripped over the raised edge, but somehow they both managed to stay on their feet.

"Hey, did you just do freaky magic stuff?" Darcy realised aloud. "You said you couldn't do freaky magic stuff! Fucking liar."

"I don't…" Loki swayed heavily, nearly pulling Darcy off her feet anyway. "I'll be fine."

Darcy tried to steady him, not entirely believing him. She remembered that flash of green she'd seen in the hotel room, at the time thinking it was just her imagination. But it must have been Loki, right before he bamfed them to God-knew-where.

She didn't have her handbag. She didn't have her taser. She didn't even have shoes. They were both just standing there, under some bridge in the rain, in pyjamas. Darcy rather inappropriately realised that she was glad she tended to wear men's pyjamas, on account of women's pyjamas not being allowed to have pockets. At least it meant that Loki wasn't wearing what amounted to flannel capris, so they didn't look completely nuts.

Actually, one guy on the other side of the tracks was wearing one of those flappy-eared beanie hats and shorts, so maybe they didn't stand out so badly after all. Darcy wondered if that guy was even cold.

"I don't know what to do. I don't even know where we are," Darcy said, trying to find anything around her that might have given her a clue. The sign announcing the stop only said Skidmore Fountain, which told her exactly nothing. "Where are we?"

Loki shook his head. "As far away as I could manage."

They were under a bridge, so Darcy was glad that he hadn't put them down in whatever river was probably nearby. She figured she'd yell at him about that later, but they couldn't just stay where they were. Darcy breathed in deeply a few times and looked around again. There was some sort of big machine standing at the centre of the platform that was probably for tickets. Maybe if she was lucky, she'd find the last person's change in it.

She considered just leaving Loki where he was and letting him fend for himself, but he kept hanging on like a giant leech as she walked over to the machine. No-one had left their change in it, and the machine wanted two dollars she didn't have. And that was just for one ticket. She wondered how heavily the trains were inspected, since the fares were self-service.

"Is that thing broken again?"

Darcy looked up to see a guy wearing glasses without lenses and the most godawful ugly shirt ever. She wondered if he had a moustache tattooed on his finger.

"No, I…" She shifted out from under Loki's weight on her shoulder and got an idea. "My friend's really sick, and my dad just freaked out on us. We just need to get to my friend's house, but she's way out in butt-fuck nowhere."

The hipster pretty-decent-guy-actually frowned and pulled out his wallet. But instead of cash, he pulled out a little book of pink, paper tickets and tore two of them out.

"Oh my god, are you serious? Thank you so much," Darcy said, taking the tickets from him.

"Don't worry about it," he said, shaking his head. "I get a month pass from work now anyway."

"Thank you. Again," Darcy said. She waited for the guy to leave before inspecting one of the tickets to see if it needed to be stamped. It did, so she spent another few seconds trying to figure out how the machine worked.

"You owe me so much," Darcy grumbled to Loki. She wanted to scrub her tongue just for calling him her friend.

Loki shifted against her, and she was pretty sure he was using her as a human crutch. "I'm already giving you your weight in gold."

"Yeah, well, I think you should double it," Darcy said curtly. She put the stamped tickets into her pocket and tried to wiggle out of Loki's grip, but he just held on even tighter.

"Fine," he said.

Darcy tried to ignore her hanger-on and looked around again. There was a sign almost right above them that she hadn't noticed before, probably because it wasn't lit. But she could still make out the the letters in the dark, glass tubes. Apparently, they were in Portland. That narrowed it down to either the East Coast or the West Coast. Annoyingly, it meant they were closer to Canada either way. Damn Loki, always getting his damn way.

"I hate you so much," she said quietly.

"I know."

Darcy almost wanted to laugh.

She didn't even hear the train until it was almost right there, ringing its bell as it slowed down to stop at the platform. A recorded woman announced the stop and which side of the train the doors were on, and then a recorded man repeated it in Spanish as a few people shuffled out of the train. Once the doors were clear, Darcy nudged Loki inside and took the first empty seat. Loki fell heavily next to her and closed his eyes like he was about to go to sleep.

"If you pass out, I'm leaving you here," she told him.

"No you won't," Loki said. He definitely sounded like he was about to fall asleep.

The train started forward with a small lurch and a high-pitched whirring sound, and for the first time since Clint nearly busted her door down, Darcy had time to actually think about what was going on. Her chest grew tight as she realised that she had been well and truly kidnapped this time, with no way of getting back. Loki probably wouldn't even let go of her long enough to let her sneak off to a pay phone. She guessed if she did get the chance, she could probably call Jane. Then she felt bad for not thinking to call her mother.

And then she wondered if anyone had even told her mother what had happened. Were they telling her right now? She hoped it wasn't Coulson. Sitwell would at least be friendly about it. Or would they fob it off to someone who was actually in New York?

And then she realised that if they hadn't got to it already, at five o'clock, her Tumblr was about to make them realise that she might not have been as kidnapped as they thought she was. Which was just as fucking ironic as it got, since now she'd actually been kidnapped. Maybe if she was lucky, she could get to a computer and delete the post from her account before it went live. Or at least before SHIELD saw it.

So many bad choices in such a short amount of time. Maybe it was a good thing she wouldn't be finishing her degree now. She'd probably make a terrible politician.

She turned to look out the window behind her, hoping to get a better idea of where they were. As they passed through an intersection, the Oregon plates on the cars gave her a little bit of hope, and another idea. Another terrible, terrible idea, but it was the best option. She knew there were people in Portland who could help her, if she could find them. Darcy turned round to the young woman in a seat to her right and waved her fingers at her.

"Hey. Do you know where the tide mark is?" she asked.

The woman shook her head and gave Darcy a confused look. "No, sorry. Is that a club?"

"No. Thanks, though." Darcy smiled tightly at her and tried to nudge Loki off her shoulder again.

They crossed a bridge, and the river Loki nearly put them into, and stopped under yet another bridge. Darcy supposed it made sense, actually. It kept people out of the rain, at least.

More people got onto the train with their huge bags and their weirdly tall bikes, and took up entirely too much room.

"Hey, do you guys know where the tide mark is?" she asked the guy with the enormous bike.

"What, in the river?" he asked. "Does the river have tides?"

Darcy shrugged. "I dunno," she said.

"No, it has tides. I'm sure of it," his lady-friend said.

Darcy let them argue over whether or not rivers had tides and settled back into her seat. She had no idea where they were even going, but she figured they could at least ride around on the train until someone finally kicked them off. At least they'd had breakfast before Loki bamfed them away to what might as well have been Narnia. She was pretty sure someone was even playing a pan flute elsewhere in the car. It sounded like a pan flute, anyway. Or at least, what she imagined a pan flute must sound like.

The bike guy and his lady-friend got off a few stops later, and this time the station was under a highway overpass. Darcy was definitely starting to think that sheltering the stops under bridges was deliberate at this point. No-one else got on though, so she couldn't ask her nonsense question again.

Once the train got moving, a guy in a big, baggy hoodie walked down the aisle. "Get off at Gateway," he said as he passed Darcy and walked to the other end of the car to sit back down.

Darcy nodded, not even sure if he was watching her. She had no idea where Gateway was, but she was pretty sure she knew why she'd been told to get off there. She nudged Loki, hoping to wake him up a little bit.

"Seriously, you so owe me," she said.

He didn't answer her. She didn't really care. She just tried to settle in as much as possible and listened to the stops being called out, trying not to be absolutely terrified about somehow walking into a trap.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


	13. Chapter 13

Darcy was surprised at how quickly the stop she'd been told to get off at was called. It was apparently a pretty big stop, because the train voice lady had a lot more to say than just which side the doors would be on. Darcy shoved Loki hard and jammed her elbow into his ribs, trying to get him to wake up.

"Let go of me so I can leave you here," she said

Loki didn't let go, but he did sit up and open his eyes. He tried to mutter something, but the way he kept his mouth shut tightly made Darcy think he was still kind of wanting to throw up.

"Come on. I'm getting off here," Darcy told him. She grabbed hold of one of the metal poles and pulled herself to her feet, trying to work against Loki's weight. He was trying to use her for leverage, and between him and the train slowing to a stop, she nearly fell over right there in the aisle. At least when she actually yelped from the pain and surprise of being pulled in several directions at once, Loki did finally ease up on his vise-like grip.

The train stopped at the station, and Darcy pulled Loki back out into the sideways rain. Not even the roof over the open-air station offered any protection from the worst weather ever. A few seconds after Darcy resigned herself to getting rained on, the guy from the train walked by and waved for her to follow after him. They crossed the tracks to one of the other platforms and stood under the useless shelter with everybody else.

"Is he all right?" he asked, eyeing Loki with some trepidation.

Darcy craned to look up at Loki. He tried to nod, but nothing about it rang true.

"I don't think so," Darcy said honestly. As much as she wanted to, she knew she wouldn't just abandon him. Not here, anyway. She'd get him somewhere safe before trying to figure out what to do about herself. Maybe she could fob Loki off to this other guy.

She watched Loki for a long moment, shifting under his weight and hoping that his grip on her arm wouldn't cause any bruises.

"They gave him the cure," she said quietly.

Hoodie Guy went from worried to trying not to be pissed off so quickly, Darcy could barely see the change. He nodded and pointed down the tracks that ran along the freeway. Darcy was so turned around, she wasn't sure if it was the same direction they'd just come from, or a different track completely.

"I know a place where you can stay. I didn't know they were doing that here," Hoodie Guy said.

Darcy wasn't sure how much she should tell him. He probably wasn't with SHIELD, but she didn't think she could really trust anyone anymore. She sighed deeply and tried to shift out from under Loki again. At least this time, Hoodie Guy helped take some of Loki's weight off of her.

"I don't know if they do," Darcy said. Either he was with SHIELD, or he wasn't. And if he wasn't, he might not even report them. "We were in New Mexico twenty minutes ago. Maybe they got the dose wrong or something, but he wasn't like this before he…" She waved her hand, trying to mime being teleported halfway across the country.

She was pretty sure Loki was getting worse, but she didn't want to say that.

"New Mexico?" Hoodie Guy asked.

Darcy looked around at the crowd on the platform. No-one seemed to really care what they were talking about, but it still made her uneasy.

"Let's talk about this somewhere else. It's been a crazy morning, and I don't even know where to start," she said.

"Yeah, you never know who's listening." He looked out at the overpass, and the train crossing it. "I think this one's ours. Once we're on the MAX, I'll see if I can get someone to pick us up from the mall. I was gonna take the bus, but I don't think we'd have very good luck with it."

Darcy snorted despite everything. "I didn't know the Rising Tide had a taxi service."

Hoodie Guy laughed as well. "We're not like Anonymous. We didn't spring out of the internet. It started out as a code for draft dodgers looking to get out of the country during Vietnam."

"Seriously?" Darcy asked. She was just hoping to find someone with the Rising Tide so she could borrow their secure internet and delete every last scrap of damning evidence from her Tumblr. But maybe Hoodie Guy could help with a lot more than just that.

The train pulled up to the platform and the three of them managed to wiggle their way on board, and even found an empty seat to try to settle Loki into. As Darcy tried to twist away, Loki's grip tightened again and tried to pull her down with him.

"Ow, you're hurting me. Let go!" she hissed through her teeth. Loki looked up at her and finally let her go. She almost wanted to run away right then and there, but if nothing else, she needed to get to a computer. She looked up at Hoodie Guy and rolled her eyes, hoping to distract some of the suspicion that was written plainly on his face.

"So, what do I call you?" she asked, pushing her hair back out of her eyes.

Hoodie Guy gave her a bemused little smile. "Kevin," he said.

Darcy smiled right back. "I'm Darcy. This one's Loki. Thanks for helping us out, and if it's cool, I kinda need to use your internet." She cringed at him, trying to convey just how badly she needed to get online.

"Yeah, that should be cool," Kevin said. He pulled out his phone and started texting people, presumably trying to get someone to come pick them up. Darcy was still worried that this had been the worst of her dumb ideas that week, and that the texts Kevin were sending were to the cops or SHIELD or whatever. She realised, standing there in damp pyjamas and disgusting socks, that she really didn't know anything about the Rising Tide. She knew they claimed responsibility for a few major hacking and whistle-blowing cases in the past, but for all she knew, they were also infested with government moles. But Kevin didn't look like a mole; he looked like the kind of guy who would get arrested for dealing just because he happened to be standing outside a 7-11. But that would have been the point, wouldn't it?

Or maybe Darcy was becoming far too paranoid to be healthy. She was seeing cops and secret agents everywhere. There was no way SHIELD could have already tracked them to Portland. Right?

The ride to the mall went fairly quickly, but by the time they got there most of the crowd had already left the car at the dozen or so stops before. Few people remained to watch Darcy and Kevin try to drag Loki off the train and down a large ramp to the parking lot two storeys below. At least the rain had finally let up.

"He's definitely getting worse," Darcy said aloud. She tried to shake him with her shoulder, but he hardly seemed to notice it at all. "Wake up. You're heavy and you're scaring me."

Loki forced his eyes open and looked over at Kevin in confusion. He'd been half-asleep since they got to Portland, and probably didn't even know what the hell was going on around him.

Kevin had managed to have someone waiting for them at ground level in an old Honda. A woman about Darcy's age watched the three of them from behind the wheel for a moment before twisting around to move something around in the back seat. Kevin opened the back door and managed to get Loki inside without cracking his head on anything, which made Darcy wonder how many barely-conscious people he'd given rides. She dashed around to the other side of the car to get in behind the driver, fiercely ignoring all the times she'd been told never to take rides from strangers, and didn't even complain when Loki immediately decided to lean on her.

Twisting around in the front seat, Kevin reached out for Loki's wrist. He frowned as he took Loki's pulse, and then without warning, reached back and put his hand against the side of Loki's neck.

"Is everything all right?" Darcy asked. She was torn between watching him and looking around for any cops that might object to Kevin sitting backwards as they drove through the parking lot.

"I can't tell," Kevin said. He twisted his arm and pressed the back of his hand against Loki's skin. "He might be hypothermic. He's freezing."

"Fuck, really?" Darcy sat up as well as she could. Now that Kevin said it, Loki did feel kind of cold. She wasn't sure if he'd always been that cold, though. She hadn't noticed him getting any colder at least.

"That's not a typical side-effect of the cure, though." Kevin turned back round in his seat as they pulled out onto the main road.

"They gave him the cure?" his friend asked. She darted a quick look into the back seat, frowning dramatically.

"Yeah." Darcy tried to shift again, but suddenly she didn't feel the need to shove Loki off of her completely. She just wanted to not be crushed. "But he's not a mutant."

Kevin turned back again to look at her. "The hell they'd give him the cure for, then?" he asked.

Darcy looked over at Loki. He needed help, and these people were their best bet right now. It was either that, or hand him back over to SHIELD, who would probably only keep him alive so they could keep poking him with sharp things.

"He's from another planet," Darcy said flatly. "I found him a couple days ago. SHIELD or SWORD or whatever were using him as a living science experiment. I took pictures and put them on Tumblr, and now SHIELD's gonna find them and they won't do anyone any good."

There was a drawn-out silence between everyone. Darcy shifted again, getting Loki so he was leaning more against her than laying on her, which was about as good as it was going to get.

"How do you know?" Kevin asked.

"What, that he's from space? Because his brother came to Earth a few weeks ago. And a few of their friends. They opened this… wormhole thing and travel through space like that. Loki came a few days after they left." Darcy looked out the window at all the dirty little shops and garages that seemed practically deserted. She wasn't sure if it was the area or the weather that made them seem abandoned, but the street seemed like a pretty busy one. Maybe no-one wanted to get out of their cars.

"You said you came here from New Mexico," Kevin said. He reached back again and pressed his fingers against the inside of Loki's wrist. "How'd you get here?"

Darcy shrugged. "Well, they gave him the cure, but it didn't work, apparently. It's meant for mutants. Not… whatever the hell he is. One minute we were in New Mexico with secret agents pointing guns everywhere, and then we were here." She twisted her neck to look at Loki. She never thought she'd miss his annoying finger-snapping, but now they were right back to that first night when she'd found him in the desert. "He got sick right after that. He told me this happened to him once before. Said it almost killed him." She said the last part quietly, almost as if saying the words might make it true. She hated him, but the last thing she wanted was for him to die. She thought maybe she should have called SHIELD, because they probably would know how to keep him alive. After everything they'd already done to him, they probably knew exactly how to keep people alive through things that should have killed them.

Somehow, suddenly everything seemed like it was her fault. Maybe he would have been better off if she had just reported him to SHIELD. He wouldn't have been dying in the back seat of someone's car, at least.

"Tina, can you go any faster?" Kevin asked. He glanced around quickly before climbing into the back seat with them.

"Going as fast as I can," Tina told him. "Unless you want me to start running red lights."

She turned at the next intersection, taking them down a road that grew progressively more suburban than urban, with big, tall trees replacing business parks and shopping centres.

Kevin slapped his fingers against the side of Loki's face. "Loki, can you hear me?" he asked.

Loki shook his head and tried to push Kevin away, which was probably a good sign.

"How long ago did he get the cure?" Kevin asked.

Darcy shrugged and shook her head. "I'm not sure. Maybe…" She tried to remember what all had happened that first night. "He's been with me for a couple of days. When I first found him, he was a mess. You should have seen him. He heals really fast, thought. You can't even see any of it now, except for his hair." She remembered how she wasn't thinking about that. "A couple of days ago, I think."

Darcy wondered if Kevin would be as helpful if he knew everything that Loki had done. She watched quietly as Kevin tried to wake him up, not sure what else she could do to help. Loki looked positively grey, but Darcy couldn't tell if that was what he actually looked like or if it just looked like that against Kevin's dark skin as he kept slapping his fingers against Loki's face. Loki was always kind of pale, really. And he was still pretty wet. Maybe it was just everything coming together to make him seem worse than he was.

Or maybe he'd travelled halfway across the galaxy to die in the back of a brown Honda Civic. Up until that moment, nothing had seemed quite real. Suddenly, the weight of everything had hit Darcy like a punch to the chest. She covered her mouth with both hands and tried to keep very quiet. The only alternative would have been to start screaming right then and there, and she definitely didn't want to do that. Her face grew hot as she willed herself to not just break down and start crying again. She was thousands of miles from home with someone who had nearly killed himself either kidnapping or rescuing her. She wasn't even sure. She'd told him so many times that if SHIELD caught them, they'd arrest her as well. At the time, she believed it. Maybe Loki did too. Maybe he hadn't kidnapped her at all.

Or maybe he grabbed her when he left because he knew this would happen. Darcy couldn't believe that he'd trust her like that, but why wouldn't he? She'd already helped him and nursed him back to health once before. What if he knew that getting away would hurt him? What if he brought her with because he knew she'd help him again?

Darcy didn't want to think about it. She tried not to think about it, but with the very literal weight of the situation leaning on her, she couldn't ignore it. She'd grown very good at ignoring things, but this was so real and so terrifying that nothing else could even start to edge in on it.

"We're almost there," Tina said over her shoulder. She took a corner a bit too quickly, skidding a little on the wet pavement. "Honey, everything's gonna be okay. Kevin knows what he's doing."

It occurred to Darcy that Tina was talking to her. She rubbed her eyes with both her hands and nodded, not sure what to say. It didn't feel like everything was okay. Everything was the very opposite of okay. Darcy had no idea what was even going on anymore, and she wasn't sure whether she wanted to panic or completely break down. Maybe she could do both.

They took another corner and stopped on the side of the road outside a small house with an overgrown front yard. Tina stopped the engine and got out to quickly run up to the house and unlock the door, while Kevin started pulling Loki out of the car. Loki was muttering something, but Darcy couldn't even tell if it was in English or Space Viking. It just sounded like muttering.

She knew she should have been helping Kevin, but she couldn't even get up. She just sat there, utterly useless and trying not to completely lose her mind. The only thing that got her moving was the realisation that she was sitting in a stranger's car trying not to cry. She'd be far more comfortable trying not to cry inside, at least. Finally, she got out of the car and followed Kevin and Tina up to the house, catching up with them at the door. Deciding she could at least be useful, she hooked Loki's arm over her shoulders and helped walk him toward the back of the house, where Kevin was trying to lead them. They came to a bedroom that looked like it belong to somebody, with the unmade bed and laundry on the floor, but it didn't seem to matter. They got Loki down onto the bed, getting him as comfortable as they could before putting a few blankets over him.

Kevin felt Loki's neck again before leaving the room. He was gone only a few moments, returning with an old glass thermometer. After managing to get it into Loki's mouth, he stepped back again and pulled out his phone to send a few more texts.

"He was fine this morning," Darcy said. She wasn't sure why she said it, but standing there in silence was doing nothing for her already-frayed nerves.

"I'm finishing up at OHSU. I'll call in a few favours. See if we can't get some stuff down here." Kevin finished sending his text and reached out for the thermometer.

"OHSU?" Darcy asked.

"Med school," Kevin said, not even looking up.

"Oh." She watched him frown at the thermometer as he held it up to the light. "What's wrong?"

"Eighty-four," Kevin said. He looked up at Darcy, looking like he wasn't sure about whatever he was thinking. "You're serious. He really is from…" He pointed up toward the sky.

Darcy almost laughed. "Yeah," she said. She hugged her arms against her chest and shrugged. "Crazy, I know."

It didn't seem to do anything to ease Kevin's mind. "I have no idea how to treat him," he admitted. "For all I know, eighty-four's completely normal."

Darcy shrugged again. "I don't know. It was below freezing down in New Mexico. Everything was cold. I didn't even notice if he was."

It occurred to Darcy that Loki didn't even seem to have noticed the cold at all. He slept on top of the blankets when he did sleep, and seemed perfectly fine in just a t-shirt, while she was freezing her ass off.

"That first night he was with me, he passed out as soon as I left him alone. Then he was fine in the morning. Maybe he just needs to sleep," Darcy guessed. She had no idea what he needed, but a dry place to sleep was probably a good place to start.

Kevin seemed to accept it as well. He nodded and put his phone back into his pocket.

"Come on," he said, nodding toward the door. "You'd better get that stuff before it gets deleted. It might be useful to have."

Darcy looked over at Loki and nodded. There was no physical evidence this time, but SHIELD or SWORD or whatever had done this to him as well. No matter what Coulson had said, they were not the good guys. Good guys didn't do this to people.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, let's do that."

She followed Kevin out of the room, because there was nothing else she could do.

—

NOTE: In light of FFN revoking access to FLAG, Calibre, and other eBook-creation apps, as well as disabling the ability to copy/paste, I have created a folder on Gdocs, which has downloadable versions of all my fic. You can also find my work on AO3, which has a built-in eBook download feature.

You can find these links on my profile.


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